


towards nuclear winter

by TobermorianSass



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: ALL THE POLITICS, Action, Cold War, Conspiracy, Espionage, Gen, No seriously its all politics, Politics, Pre-First War with Voldemort, Racism, Spy thriller, The Wizarding version of the Cuban Missile Crisis & Berlin Crisis smashed into one, Wizarding History, Wizarding Politics, Wizarding Racism, Xenophobia, which needs a warning of its own lbr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 12:36:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 42,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8208254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: Being a collection of personal accounts concerning the events leading up to and following the German Border Crisis of January, 1968, the details of which have hitherto remained obscured from the public eye.Or, the story of how Amelia Bones singlehandedly saved wizarding Europe from nuclear war, Rufus Scrimgeour got his limp, Nobby Leach was forced from office and Augustus Rookwood got his dark mark.





	1. The First Casualty

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2016) collection. 



> *walks in 15 minutes late with Starbucks and a novella in hand*
> 
> no but seriously guys, this fic has been an amazing amount of fun to research and write and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it . Special shoutout to [zielenna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zielenna), who patiently waded through my ridiculously long sentences and told me where to chop them in half and also held my hand while I shouted about how this kept going on and on WHILE literally moving countries. Also shoutout to punkdraco for doing a cultural beta for this & helping me flesh out the political aspect of the worldbuilding, especially wrt the USSR & soviet cold war politics & social life. Big thank you also to [memorde](http://archiveofourown.org/users/memorde) who made sure I was keeping everything taut and tense and to malapropism who beta read parts of this to make sure the posh boys sounded appropriately posh.
> 
> And ofc, shoutout to [EssayOfThoughts](http://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts) without whom a great deal of the background headcanon to this fic wouldn't exist and who is also the literal best repository of HP information & trivia in the world. A good number of the magical creatures and non-canon spells you see mentioned in here are all hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note on short forms:
> 
> DIMC = Department of International Magical Cooperation  
> DoM = Department of Mysteries  
> DMLE = Department of Magical Law Enforcement  
> AK = Avada Kedavra  
> AMC = Alliance of Muggle-Cooperative countries  
> ICW = International Confederation of Wizards
> 
> There is a very blink and you miss it rape joke that makes its appearance towards the end of this chapter. Also, a looooooooooooot of wizard racism.

_The grammar of les Sacres is painfully simple: a pureblood on his own is a Mister; with his wife they make an inbreeding; any number above this can safely be called a conspiracy_. – Benjamin Rupert Smith, Gentleman Of Leisure and A Wit, 14 Jan 1939.

 _For twenty-four hours, on the 29th of January, 1968, wizards and witches across Europe huddled around their wireless sets, wondering who would cast the first spell and tip the continent over into a war no one wanted. There is very little to be said about the events which have now come to be called the German Border Crisis of 1968, except that it constitutes an embarrassing chapter in the history of wizarding kind – one which could easily have been avoided had the parties involved attempted to build bridges instead of resorting to jingoistic nationalist sabre-rattling. Its repercussions have been many, but perhaps its most significant contribution to the socio-political relations of Europe was its exposure of the weaknesses of the Alliance of Muggle-Cooperative nations and secondly, its strengthening of the terror with which continental Europe has approached war ever since. It is this second which has had a longer-lasting effect on the history of the continent and is alone responsible for the trepidation and often, the reluctance, with which the continental countries approached the problem of sending peacekeeping Auror corps to Britain during the war with Voldemort._ – **A Contemporary History of Wizarding Europe** by Ethelred Esterhase, 1989.

* * *

**i. 1963**  


It was one of those rare summery evenings in England, where everything comes to life after a long hot day in which the heat is unbearable, the sun too bright and one of those oppressive silent hazes settles over the countryside by the afternoon. The Ministry had declared a ten per cent increase in the country’s gross national product (which everyone had hurrah-ed about in a lackadaisical way because the heat was too oppressive for anything except the odd bottle of iced champagne in some of the wealthier London offices). A new generation of bright young things for whom the Great War was only little more than a dim memory of sirens, slim Honeydukes rations and no butter, if even that, were slowly creeping out on to the streets. In less than a year, magical Britain would be _the_ place to be and their bright young things would be very bright and very fashionable and above all, very Cool, but for now, the war generation shook their heads and thought this was all a sign of an inherent character deficiency: a tendency towards frivolity, selfishness and a disturbing lack of patriotism. They would still think this a year later, but a good many of them would be far too busy reaping the profits off the business of Cool to pay more than lip service to this particular strain of thought.

It was the twentieth of July, nineteen sixty-two, the muggles were gearing up to war: and no one could have cared less.

No, this was not strictly true. Up in Cambridgeshire, on the outskirts of the tiny wizarding village of Hoxheath, two bright young things were slowly coming to life, shaking off their daytime ennui – and the last side effects of last night’s excesses – ensconced on the marble steps to the Lestrange manor’s portico as the sun slid further down the horizon – and at least _one_ of them cared about the prospect of the muggles going to war.

“Did you know,” he told his friend, only slightly slurrily, “the muggles have a bomb?”

The muggles had a wall too, but the young wizard was not interested in it. He cared about what the muggles did in a careless kind of way, the way affluent young purebloods cared about the things the muggles did. He knew vaguely, for example, that the muggles had been at each others’ throats while Grindelwald had been trotting around Europe. There had been one or two scares - German bombers flying in over East Anglia – that were little more than vaguely remembered childhood memories, filled in by his parents’ reminiscences. There had been sirens and the low guttural rev of the engine motors and blackouts all narrated in excruciating detail by his mother and father. He supposed it was their way of Connecting with the Younger Generation, an attempt to pass their memories on to him. Merlin knew why, but people were funny about this sort of thing. Once, while cleaning out the attic, he had mapped a history of the muggles’ war using the old papers his mother squirrelled away: tucked away on page twenty of each, a tiny section which conveniently totalled the mounting number of muggle dead. Horrific stuff. Unimportant stuff. The muggles were always busy slaughtering each other, hating each other, exploiting each other like the animals they were. That was the muggle way of life: a state of perpetual horror: so what did it matter, anyway, if they were dying like flies everywhere. But the muggles weren't content to die like flies in peace and somewhere between the last century and this they'd gone and made themselves a bomb in a fit of spite-filled ingenuity.

Or more appropriately: the Bomb. A capital B weapon of unparalleled destructive power, unlike anything anyone had ever seen before and it was going to change the landscape of war forever. The muggles were always saying things like that. They said it each time they came up with some new kind of gun, some new way of slaughtering each other. Consider the facts – the last time they’d had to redo the wards on their house was three years before he’d been born. Why? Because those blasted muggles were keen on blasting everyone out of their homes. Once the muggles stopped fighting, there was no need for new wards but as long as they were at each other’s’ throats the wards had to be changed. At the time, their new wards had kept them safe from the shelling: fresh from St. Paul’s, right after they’d bombed Coventry into a hollow stinking husk of itself. That was the muggles all over: no respect for history or art or culture. Just: kill, kill, kill. Or, in this case, shell, shell, shell. No stopping until it was all gone, all dead, all destroyed. They really were ghastly, the muggles. It was only the old Minister’s timely intervention which had saved the monuments of their great past – St. Paul’s and the Tower and good old Oxbridge. But the muggles were clearly determined to take everyone down with them, so now they’d gone and made themselves The Bomb because their wards kept the shells out. That was the truth of it, much as the Ministry liked to deny it.

“The muggles have got a bomb,” he repeated.

“Vile creatures,” his friend replied, pressing his cheek against the cool floor of the portico and dangling a glass of champagne precariously in the hand hanging over the edge of the steps.

“The muggles?”

“No,” his friend said. “The rabbits. Fucking ruin the lawn - _fuck off you little buggers_.”

He squinted at the pair of rabbits gambolling on the grounds - another class of creature revived by the evening cool - and sighed.

There were two classes of wizards: the kind who were carelessly interested in the muggles’ affairs and the kind who imagined the muggles were a bizarre species of mythical creature, like the chimera. His friend belonged to that second kind. He firmly believed the muggles were a conspiracy created by the Ministry as a pathetic excuse to wrap them all up in red tape and curb their right to bear wands as they pleased. He wasn't sure what or who they were meant to please, though he suspected it had to do with all the restrictions on what kind of magic one could use: those endless lists of spells and curses and hexes deemed too dark to be allowed - and where one could use it and at what age and what have you. All a part of civic duty. Moral responsibility to the muggles. Moral responsibility to be concerned about The Bomb and their collective futures. His friend viewed the prospect of being morally responsible with suspicion and distaste - and so did half their kind of wizards.

It was shaping up to be the great political debate of their time.

“I don't see why all the muggles get to have all the fun,” his friend had told him once. “They don't even have magic.”

What it worked out to was this: any attempt to hold a sensible conversation with him about the things the muggles were getting up to, even if he put it forward as dispassionately as he could - _anthropological interest_ , he would say, _purely anthropological interest_ \- was an uphill struggle. It involved a good deal of dodging around the deliberate rabbit trails his friend would lead him down to avoid being _serieux_ , until at last he wrestled him into facing at least a version of the truth, no matter how diluted, head on.

The young wizard sighed and filled his glass with some more of the Malfoy vintage, regarding his friend sprawled out on his stomach on the marble with exasperated fondness. The subject would have to be broached. The Bomb was no laughing matter, no silly story conjured by the Ministry to make money and make their lives a little harder. The Ministry’s continued silence on the subject, the empty pages of the Prophet - more vacuous news about the latest Quidditch sweetheart’s misdoings, more pointless squabbling over the Ministerial budget (education or defence?: _Time To Disarm!_ screamed the Quibbler, _We Must Defend Against the European Threat_ , insisted the _Prophet_ ) - was proof of its importance.

“You’re ruining your robes,” he murmured, then louder: “they’re only rabbits.”

His friend inched forward and plonked his face down on his knees.

“They eat the grass,” his friend mumbled. “Leaves these ugly blotchy marks on the grounds and then Father has one of his temper tantrums over a couple of idiot varmint ‘cos the Ministry won’t let him AK them on private property.”

“There won’t be much of the grounds left for your Father to worry about if the muggles drop their bomb,” he continued, discreetly trying to edge the conversation back round.

“I don’t want to talk about the muggles, Bats. I’m too fucking old for this.”

“You’re eighteen.”

“Exactly,” his friend said perversely, turning his head around to regard him through cloudy and unfocused blue eyes. “I have my whole life spread out before me, an evening with a bottle of Blishen’s best and you want to talk about the fucking muggles.”

That was Rodolphus Lestrange for you. Dipsomaniac, dilettante, drone. The very best of the very worst of the Flitterbies and unlike a good number of them, occasionally charming. Perversely charming. He was doing it right now, turning that blithe disregard for life in all its serious parts; that petted artless naïveté, on him. It would have worked because it always worked. Dolly Lestrange always had his way. It was all part of the Lestrange aristocratic charm, along with the Lestrange temper, arrogance, insolence and pride – presumably the rambling grounds of Lestrange Place and the Lestrange accounts made up for these familial quirks – along with the Lestrange good-looks. Even like this: tousle-haired and eyes unclear and unfocused from too much champagne imbibed too quickly, too untidy to be anything except a scruffy teenage boy, Rodolphus Lestrange was still good-looking. Maybe even good-looking enough to make his dronish tendencies forgivable.

Maybe it was just the champagne and the soft evening sun and the mellow torpor that had settled on them along with the arrival of summer which made this – lying in the fading light of the setting sun and drinking and pushing the future away for another day – so easy, so enjoyable.

He leaned back against one of the marble pillars and contemplated his glass of wine, watching the way the light caught in the drink and turned the evening light harsh and red. If the muggles dropped The Bomb, this wouldn’t be a sight held in the curves of a wine glass but everywhere, everything, bathed red and dying as a second man-made sun exploded in the sunset. If the muggles had their way, they’d continue in this torpor, burning up until they died: indolent, futureless and dead, dead, dead.

“We’re going to have this conversation,” he said, lowering his glass and looking at his friend. “Now, later. It’ll only get worse.”

Rodolphus rolled his eyes. “Tell me about the muggles and their bomb.”

“The Bomb,” he corrected him. “Big B. Big explosion. End of the world, that sort of stuff.”

Rodolphus wrinkled his nose, clearly unimpressed by this. “They said that about the krauts.”

“The krauts never had one of these,” he replied. “D’you ever hear about Japan?”

“Might have heard the pater mention it once or twice, why?”

“Well the papers and the Ministry all said it was the European Threat rearing its sordid head in East Asia,” he said. “Some kind of sorry attempt at revenge for their failure to join in with The Cause, along with the rest of them - that sort of thing. But the _muggle_ newspapers all said it was The Bomb - fact - it was the Americans, you know. The muggles, that is. Apparently they’d been building this in quiet while they were all busy slaughtering each other across Europe, so they could kill each other more efficiently I suppose. Did the trick - took out two whole cities – muggles, wizards, everything – ‘s why everyone was happy to believe it was Grindelwald and his people. ‘Cept Grindelwald and his people never went around blowing up wizards outside of Europe. Stands to reason it was the muggles. It was the whole thing, wards and all, every last bit of it. Not even Grindelwald could manage that.”

This was enough to drag Rodolphus out of his sozzled ennui to put his glass away and prop himself up on his arm. “The whole city?”

“ _Two_ whole cities. Every single last one of ‘em, all gone,” he paused, allowing his words to sink in: thousands of wizards and wards and all, atomized in the blink of an eye.

Even the witch hunts paled by comparison.

Only the muggles could have managed something as asinine as to make a conclusive case for their total ineptitude at self-rule. What good was murder without the guilt and the spectres of victims dancing around ominously at dinner tables? But mass murder and mass graves were the muggles’ specialty. One had to hand it to the muggles: they were excellent professionals. Exceptionally efficient, even with their Bomb. It should have made the news with the muggle-ish in fashion, but the muggles were in vogue and sense was not: no one wanted to face the ugly bare bones of the matter. Instead, the Ministry put a tight lid on it, raised their taxes, slapped more regulations on what curses and hexes could and couldn’t be used - and then looked the other way while the muggles proved Grindelwald’s case for _Das Grossere Wohl_.

“The best piece of disinformation the Ministry’s ever put out,” he said, while Rodolphus digested this piece of information in silence. “Don’t ask me why.”

“I know why,” Rodolphus replied sourly, flopping back down on his lap, the right way up this time. “The moral responsibilities and duties of all citizens who possess the right to bear wands. Section two, paragraph one, the International Declaration of Collective Cocksucking and Sticking Our Heads Up Dumbledore’s Arse, 1945.”

“So you _did_ study for your WOMBATs,” he said.

“I couldn’t not, could I?” Rodolphus replied, deeply and bitterly moved at the thought of having to _work_ like the rest of them. “What with father going on about being gainfully employed and contributing meaningfully to society and the changing times and using one’s influence for the betterment of one’s world, blah blah blah. ‘S a fucking dead bore.”

“Well are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Going to be gainfully employed and a contributing member of society.”

Rodolphus pulled a face. “If you call playing fetch for the Secretary for External Affairs gainful employment and not demeaning hard labour. I mean - Salazar’s sake, I’m a _Lestrange_ of Lestrange Place, I can’t play fetch for someone’s sodding _tea_ \- you’d think they had fucking house elves for that.”

“How _ever_ will you survive,” he murmured.

“Piss off,” said Rodolphus, without much rancour, too champagne-and-sun-soaked, too softened by the evening cool to work himself up into a proper rage. “‘Sides I don’t see _you_ making yourself useful to anyone.”

“No,” he agreed, sadly. “I’m afraid I just don’t have the temperament for it. I shall have to lock myself away in a garret and starve to death writing sad little papers about the nature of magic. Or else become a work of art.”

“Oxford?” Rodolphus asked him, correctly decoding this extravagant statement to be an oblique reference to his forays into academia.

“Worse” he replied, even sadder than before. “Cambridge.”

This unleashed a string of vituperative swear words from Rodolphus, who sat bolt upright and glared at him fiercely as though this was a personal betrayal.

“You’re not serious,” he said.

“Dead serious.”

“The bloody thing’s run over by the cogheads and the MLCS crowd,” said Rodolphus - then, suspiciously: “You’re not holding out on us about something, are you Bats?”

He sighed, rolling the stem of his wine glass between his fingers and contemplating the way this made the remaining wine quiver inside. It was still the height of summer, but the days were already growing shorter and every day the sun grew a little weaker, the nights grew a little cooler and the problem was this: one day the summer would end and the two of them would have to face life head on. Rodolphus had the Ministry and he’d have the Department of Mysteries one day. Nott had as good as promised him the job. Cambridge was a stepping stone, a neither here nor there between here and there and something else - between him and the future and the muggles and their bomb with the large B, end of the world and all those grim, dark forebodings.

“I don’t know if you’re too _serieux_ or simply morbid,” Rodolphus had told him one night, while they were slowly strolling along the Thames, arms carelessly slung around each other’s’ necks, pleasantly sozzled on both wine and one of those elaborate modern operas Dolly enjoyed. He’d been elaborating on the decadent horrors of the key of C minor and Dolly, Dolly as usual had been too full of high spirits, too good-humoured to join in. “Either way it’s absolutely unforgivable.”

And yet, here was Rodolphus, determined to turn him away from his errant ways and not play traitor to his own kind, determined to forgive him for his curious peccadilloes once more. Poor Dolly with his misguided saving people thing. He really had no idea.

“Darling you won’t have to worry about me,” he told Rodolphus, in that same sad voice. “It’s just that one has to know one’s enemies intimately before one can beat them at their own game.”

* * *

**ii. 1962 - 1965**  


Rodolphus worried all the same. Bats went up to Kings at Cambridge to read Thaumaturgy in the late summer that year and by the time All Souls had rolled around, so had the news that Bats had gone and done the unthinkable and thrown his lot in with the muggles. _Dolly dearest_ , he wrote on muggleish notepaper, _I trust you’ve heard all the very worst about me already, from everyone except me, but I must say Physics is a damned sight more interesting than Thaumaturgy - I know you’re tempted to worry, but this is all part of The Grand Plan, so you’ll simply have to twiddle your thumbs and get on without me, please don’t do anything hideously stupid and no I haven’t been bewitched by the muggles, stop making that face - yours as always, Bats_. And at the very bottom of the notepaper was a scribbled sickle and a hammer that sent Lestrange senior flying into a stomping rage about the new European Threat.

The new European Threat loomed large and gloomy over everything. It followed Rodolphus to work and back. There were snatches of it in the corridors of the DIMC. The Germans were at each others’ throats over whether or not the head of their DMLE, who was a known Grindelwald supporter, could hold office and some particularly annoying idealists were making noises about a secession which, as old Higgs told him over drinks at the ‘Livers, all had to do with border troubles down in east Europe. And that, in turn, had to do with the muggles who were busy redrawing their maps and building walls - _straight through Berlin_ , said the senior Montmorency, personally offended. _No consideration for us at all_. This wasn’t the only trouble on their hands, some of it came filtering in from the muggle world: a crisis worlds away in Cuba – and here he thought of Bats ranting away about the Bomb with fire in his eyes, but Bats, of course, was currently out of fashion and out of favour – and another more worrying crisis, much closer home in Whitehall that had their boys down in Vauxhall hot and bothered which consequently had all of them with their knickers in a twist. All because some sorry sod from Cambridge - sodding Cambridge, that hideous spectre chasing Rodolphus down every waking hour he could spend, thinking about Bats all alone and surrounded by muggles and muggle sympathizers - got some funny idea stuck in his head.

“I mean, the bloody nerve,” said the Selwyn girl, dangling her long legs tantalizingly over the corner of Rodolphus’ desk. “Selling out dear old Albion – and to the Russians, of all people. At least old Grindelwald had the right idea. Some people have simply no consideration at all – old Montmorency’s nearly run me off my feet.”

And here she stretched out a single shapely foot for him to inspect, but the Selwyn girl was off the market and Rodolphus suspected this show of interest had less to do with his own charms or Montmorency running them all off their feet and more to do with Smith, glowering away at the sight in his corner outside Urquart’s office.

Another letter from Bats, sent in early February along with the hint of scandal winding its way around Whitehall and the rumours of purges, everyone in the DIMC on edge as the Vauxhallers came around and interviewed them about their private affairs for “security” ( _Ah yes, a Lestrange of Lestrange Place_ , said the Scot who’d come round to interview him, and then waved him on his way without bothering with him). This time the-hammer-and-sickle had the pride of place rather than being carelessly tacked on at the end of the letter as an absurd muggleish punctuation: _Dolly dearest_ , _you’ll be delighted to hear I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into the task of going native among the muggles and have acquired myself a young, nubile guide to lead me through the intricacies of muggle social life. I tell her that I’m a dastardly inbred primitive from an impossibly tiny village in an East Anglian swamp but she’s what they call too smart for her own good and isn’t buying it. Think she suspects I’m a filthy frivolous aristocrat of sorts - isn’t that a lark, Dolly? You’ve raised me well - so naturally I’ve taken to tattooing her silly little symbol everywhere (c.f. above) and I shall now start in on muggle philosophy. I aim to make a fool of her by the end of the month. (It’s the tweed isn’t it? I suspect it’s the tweed. Very hunting party.) As for the rest of it, I’m no closer to The Bomb, but Physics is still infinitely more interesting than Thaumaturgy. What else? The pater has been sending me letters asking me to come to my senses or else I’ll end up being the family disgrace. I tell him I haven’t a single rebellious bone in my body, but the fellow won’t listen. You’ll have to do the trick, won’t you? - I remain as always, your filthy frivolous Bats. P.S. mon vieux, when I cancelled my membership at Tulgey’s, it wasn’t so you could go storming around telling everyone it was a mistake and then offering to pay on my behalf. I would be obliged if you would keep your nose, as charming as it is, out of my affairs, hmmm?_

Summer passed in a haze, in a flurry of letters sent back and forth, to too many people, too many words, too many places - to Freddie Yaxley and Zabini and Higgs and Parkinson and Pucey. Bats now occupied the status of resident wit, a curious and harmless eccentric, intrepid explorer of the muggle world, confirming their worst suspicions about the muggles. The muggles were careless and cruel, barbaric and bloodthirsty. _I hear they’re selling state secrets for sex now_ , Bats wrote, _wouldn’t you?_ Meanwhile, the DIMC took up residence in Lake Cuomo as the spooks from Vauxhall swept their offices out; national security and all that. And while they lounged carelessly under the warm Italian sun, Bats wrote and wrote and wrote. _Bloody foul weather_. Sheets and sheets of parchment and owl after owl and one solitary louche photograph. _The muggles have finally discovered sex and treason all at once, aren’t they dears? (c.f. the attached photo_ ).

The greetings grew more and more extravagant: _salutations my decadent capitalist filth, my dearest imperialist scum_ , _mon cher bourgeoise swine_ : and in one particularly memorable letter - _you sir are a member of the repressed and oppressive aristocratic classes and the revolution won’t stand for it, bodily or materially_. How much it entertained them to see the primitives in action, mocked and mimicked in Bat’s carelessly entertaining fashion. There was something of rebellion in the air too. A new and unnamed order, still in birth pains, which meant they all stuck up their noses at their fathers and laughed when they fumed and fretted, which meant Rodolphus stuck his tongue out at the senior Lestrange when he tried to fling one of Bats’ letters into the fire. _Filthy, pornographic material_ , he called it. _Better than your sodding Ministry memos_ , he told his father - even though he could not shake the sensation that while this was a joke, if the joke was ever to be pierced, or if the joke ever failed, Bats dearest would have a long long way to fall.

* * *

If 1963 was the muggles’ _annus mirabilis_ , or as Bats put it – the year they discovered sex and treason – then 1964 was their _annus terribilis_ : the year it all went horribly to shit. A mud parked himself in the Minister’s office and refused to budge from there, not even when the elder Montmorency and Travers, from the DMLE, conspired to unleash ten weeks’ worth of accumulated paperwork on him. In any other man this would have been admirable, on the mud this was bloodyminded mulishness. He turned up to work, despite the glares and the insistent whispers about how he’d fought on the muggles’ side during the Great War and didn’t it make it difficult to know where his _true_ allegiance lay? No, he struggled on with an infuriatingly Hufflepuffish persistence, cleared out the paperwork and then threw himself determinedly into the task of getting himself _involved_ in Ministry affairs.  


“He seems quite determined to stay,” said Black, reviewing the notes on the upcoming ICW conference – Corfu in February, more handwringing over the New European Threat and the German secessionists, who were now running around and calling themselves an _alliance_ while the public lapped it all up. “The question one asks oneself is whether he is equally determined to be _remembered_ \- and more to the point, are our friends the best people for the delicate job at hand?”

While the - _mud_ \- was busy poking his nose into all their affairs and offering everyone advice no one wanted - _ministering_ , in essence, as Orion Black put it with gentle sardonic humour - the New European Threat washed up on their shore, right on the doorstep of that venerable institution of rational thought: _The Wixenomist_. In late May - San Tropez, a DIMC workshop for the secretaries, unofficial title: _Honey Traps and How To Spot If You Are In the Middle Of One_ – their editor for European affairs packed his bags, crossed the border from Germany into Transylvania and defected – _to the muggles_. The reasons were quite immaterial; what mattered was that he was one of _them_ ; he’d hung around the Ministry and shared drinks with them at the ‘Livers, attended their dinner parties and spent the evenings at the same clubs as the rest of them. This was betrayal at its rudest and finest and the _gall_ of it - the worst part of it was this: on the Monday following his defection, Bats wrote a passionate letter to the _Prophet_ in defence of Leo Inkpin _ne_ Fabian Montmorency, stridently calling for the abolition of borders, the abolition of the Statute of Secrecy and the abolition of their way of life altogether.

 _We have far too many marble mausoleums filled with airheaded young men drifting along their corridors_ , he wrote, _and far too few clever minds like Leo Inkpin’s - one of these must be abolished if we’re to pull ourselves into the twentieth century and it isn’t the rank and file of junior secretaries, senior secretaries, private secretaries, permanent private secretaries, every marble-mouthed species of secretary imaginable, that’s going to do the trick for us._

“Bats really has lost it hasn’t he?” Freddie Yaxley said, latching on to his sleeve at the doorway to the Flitterbies that Monday afternoon during their lunch hour. “One might even say he’s becoming quite _batty_.”

The letter which followed that evening was remarkably silent on the subject of the _Prophet_ : _the muggles have a fascinating theory about sex, civilization and the equality of the masses The Girl is simply dying to try out. One can’t say no, of course. Science in the name of testing Mr Marcuse’s hypotheses: naturally a job which must be carried out by the latest inductees to the resident college Marxist Soc. Oh sorry, I did forget to mention that earlier, didn’t I? Well it make no difference now, the kneazle’s out of the bag and all that. I suppose very soon I shall apply to HQ down in London for a full induction into the Communist Party. Don’t make that face dearest, one must sow one’s oats freely and wildly and especially in one’s youth_.

“I’m not entirely sure one can dismiss this as mere eccentricity,” Higgs told Freddie that evening at the Flitterbies, over a game of impromptu croquet with _engorgio’d_ silver spoons in the hall. “He _is_ at Cambridge.”

“Cambridge isn’t one of the redbricks,” said Freddie. “He’s always been a little mad. I’m sure he doesn’t believe half the things he says.”

“But you have to admit,” said Pip Zabini, taking aim with his spoon, “he has been acting _odd_ lately - damn - he’s never been eccentric in one direction before.”

“And then there’s the matter of The Girl,” said Livy Parkinson.

“Ah yes, The Girl,” said Zabini. “Two might have been understandable, but one is quite unforgivable.”

“Quite unforgivable,” Higgs repeated as the rest of them murmured agreement over The Girl. “He seems to have acquired what one might call a sense of camaraderie with The Girl, which is very different from sex, you’ll agree.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Freddie. “He’s one of _us_ \- Dolly - _Dolly_  - Merlin’s sake Dolly, get off your arse and come here -”

What could he have said to them with that letter in his hand? He threw it in the fire first and watched it until it was gone and then strolled over with a feigned lightness because Bats, Bats had put him in a dangerous position, between friendship and kinship even though the two should have been the same - but then the history of the wizarding world was a history of them fighting: friendship or kinship. Blood or water. The Lestrange motto was clear on the subject - too clear, much too clear.

So he said with a carefully measured drawl: “You know those troublesome Germans finally collected themselves enough to secede today? Driving Black raving mad about it.”

_\--_

_Dolly, Dolly, Dolly - Dolly dearest, don’t sulk._

\--

By Christmas their conversations were conducted entirely in half whispers and half-swallowed sentences - _such a shame_ , _d’you know_ , _I’d have never thought_ , _well it **is** Cambridge_ \- and disapproving frowns from his mother who never said anything but didn’t need to, every time she glared coldly at his owl. Bats was busy, Bats was spending Christmas with the muggles, Bats was now a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party, Bats was writing for _The Quibbler_ , Bats was writing letters to the _Prophet_ , Bats Bats Bats Bats Bats -

“I don’t think you should be friends with him anymore,” said Silly Selwyn, holding out a cigarette for him to light. “People are starting to talk.”

This was self-evident, perhaps patronizing on her part. He didn’t need her to tell him there were rumblings making their way around their circle, no longer confined to the bitter older generation but among the bright young things of their circle too. Conversations died out at the Flitterbies before resuming with unnatural gusto every time he stepped into the club. The Infernals were far less circumspect, far less well-bred: _I’d teach that girl of his a lesson if I were you, Dolly_. But Dolly, of course, was not a gentleman of leisure in the same vein as Amycus Carrow was and Orion Black, whatever he thought about Bats and his _mésalliance_ , frowned on the slightest hint of scandal. His hands were tied, so Dolly burnt the letters and sent back treatises titled _Das Grossere Wohl_ instead.

“D’you know he’s going around writing alternate histories to everyone?” she asked him with one of her irritating high-pitched titters. “Revisionist history. Such a funny word, isn’t it? One might as well call it _lies_. I suppose you’ve heard his latest thing with the goblins and how we ought to make “reparations” for all the wealth we “stole” from them?”

That was last week’s letter, straight into the fire and its answer: _Private Property, Public Property: A History of Property Law and Wizengamot Rulings on the Same_ by James Kincardine, 1907.

“Have you heard? Davis has started broadcasting his own station from his sodding farm,” he said instead. “Just to play _The Kneazles_ after they banned it on the _WWN_. They’ve made a mess of it, but I’ll say Davis has far better taste than the man who does _Popular Hour_.”

“It’s too extreme,” she persisted. “What with this and the absolute drivel he’s been writing in the _Quibbler_ , he’s become quite the MLCS - everyone’s talking about it, you know.”

“‘Y’know that song of theirs?” he asked. “Goes like this - _doo doo doo dah dah doo_ \- ‘s a _great_ song.”

“Some people might say anything reeking of friendship with such a person would make a person completely unsuitable for a job in the DIMC,” she said. She tapped her cigarette out and paused. “Some might even question where their loyalties lay, consequently.”

“I’d try them out if I were you,” he said. “They’re saying Davis and his barnyard show’s going to be the next big thing.”

“Of course, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard,” she said, now playing at being nauseatingly innocent. “No one wants to be the one with the next Inkpin on their hands or you know -” and here she lowered her voice to a whisper, “like the _muggles_. One wouldn’t want to tell tales, but one _does_ wonder - and you were so close to him in school.”

“Is that a threat?”

She smiled sweetly and patted his arm. “I’m only a _permanent_ private secretary, remember?”

February that new year was cold, dreary and miserable. Bats sent letters thrice a day, none of them tender and all of them full of foreign muggle-ish names and foreign muggle-ish things and endless proselytizing screeds - about house-elves and goblins, werewolves and muds, equality, taxes and other dreary things - that made the words swim on the page. All of it punctuated by that odd muggle symbol Bats was so fond of. One hammer and sickle, now proliferate and now deliberately scratched into each of the pages in a manner that could only be described as provocative. _You might say I am now a true blue Cambridgite_. This, at least, was indisputably true, even if Dolly had no letters to pore over to see if he’d missed something crucial, some self-evident truth, the moment when it had all started going to shit - if there had been a moment when Bats had turned on him, some moment where he’d failed. (Failed what? To impress the seriousness of it all on Bats. To convince Bats they were beating for the same team. Bats – Bats _himself._ ) All he had were the memories: Bats who had once been thoroughly convictionless: _serieux_ one moment, lighthearted the next, now, only _serieux_ and dangerous and fanatic ( _the image of the muggle we insist on holding on to is outdated, the modern muggle is quite sophisticated and the abolition of the Statute of Secrecy is the only way we can shake ourselves out of this damnable doldrums we’ve lulled ourselves into_ ) – and all of it was suddenly damnably false.

In principle, there was no difference between this and the Inkpin affair and that was what worried him most. The most shocking thing about the affair was not the defection: defections were a sickle a dozen. The muggles seemed to have them every half-year. This was not the problem. _Someone_ could turn out wrong at any time, but that was _not_ the most offensive thing about this either. Once upon a time, before he was a hack and an Inkpin, Leo Inkpin had been Fabian Montmorency: a Montmorency of Toveland Hall, the last of the old guard, the last of the great old families. _One of the boys_. Only one of the dreary muds would do something as lowly as suspect a Montmorency of treason because Montmorencys, whatever else they were - and there were plenty of things to be said about them, chiefly concerning their unnatural wholesome fondness for the muddy and rainy outdoors – understood the bonds of kinship which held them all together and which meant they all rose and fell together. Eccentricities were tolerable, betrayal was tolerable: proselytizing, moralizing betrayal was not. Despite knowing all of this, Fabian Montmorency had turned and Fabian Montmorency, like Bats, was a Cambridge man. Pry a little harder and he too would have had a Dolly he sent sanctimonious and preachy letters to, letters which must have been dismissed as nothing more than a phase he would grow out of eventually.

“He’s going too far,” said Freddie, that spring. “One doesn’t like to speak ill of one’s family, but damn it all, Dolly, a line’s got to be drawn _somewhere_. D’you know what Diggory told me the other day? Says Gambol’s been going around telling everyone Bats is working for the muggles now - ‘I’m all for equality but there’s a bloody difference between equality and out and out terrorism and he isn’t drawing the fucking line’ he said. A _coghead_ , Dolly, a coghead and an MLCS. Y’hear that? Even they’re dropping him - Dolly for fuck’s sake, are you listening? - Gambol says he’s been tapped by the muggles, the Russian muggles. D’you understand? Their muggles _know_ about us, Inkpin’s told them and Gambol’s saying he’s working for them. He’s blowing the entire Statute apart singlehandedly. Damn it all but it’s in bad taste, this MLCS twaddle is one thing but those blasted letters and pieces for the Quibbler crowd’s going too far. Merlin’s balls Dolly, you might respond to a chap you know? People are talking and they ain’t nice when they talk. Surprised your mum and dad haven’t said anything about it to you - have they? Oh dash it, Dolly, talking to you's like bashing one's head against a sodding brick wall.”

Bats came down from Cambridge that summer with The Girl in tow and everyone made a point of pointedly not talking about it except in the gravest of undertones. This was serious business, so naturally they discussed it over lunches and at _soirees,_ with solemn headshaking at Ministry dos and in their clubs over impromptu games of croquet - and patted themselves on their backs for their circumspection and discretion. The distinction was a nicety only the select few could understand.

“Cow,” said Carrow, with a scowl and that was all there was to be said about _her_.

“I don’t grudge a fellow his foibles,” said Higgs, “but he might be decent about it and not shove it in our faces.”

And that would have been all to be said about _him_ , if not for the unhappy affair at Grey’s.

The infuriating thing was, nineteen sixty-five had all the makings of a good year. Whitehall, for once, was at peace with itself, with nothing leaking over from the muggle front into their backyard - nothing at least which concerned _him_. The Africa desk was being run off its feet with the mess down in Rhodesia, but this was Smith’s problem and therefore, an endless source of amusement. The summer may have been wet and dull, but apart from Smith none of them were being run off their feet, _The Kneazles_ had a new album out and girls in London and the smarter parts of England were now running about in mini-robes, showing off their long and shapely legs to the delight of all the young Flitterbies who had, in turn, abandoned the dreary tweed and black robes and monocles of their fathers in favour of velvet dyed startling maroons and blues and mustards and the odd bright green here and there, for the odd dashing Slytherin. And on the wireless, the doddering old fool who ran the _Popular Hour_ boldly declared ‘you’ve never had it so good before’ while Spencer Davies, from his backyard, broadcasted hour after hour of what the mags were calling ‘wrock and wroll’ peppered with delightful vulgarities – _tune in, drop out, turn off, fuck off_ – to ward off the ennui of the British summer.

In a way, the affair with Grey’s began earlier that day at The Flitterbies.

They were not entirely sober when they wound their way to The Flitterbies in the early hours of that morning in late July and this would prove to be an important fact later on, when determining why he had found none of Bats’ behaviour suspicious. Ordinarily, this was not unusual: The Flitterbies was a refuge for high-spirited young wizards who felt the nights were only just beginning when the rest of the world was going to bed. Three A.M in the morning was precisely the sort of time when the club really came into its own, with impromptu croquet games hosted in the hallway or bread thrown because some poor sod would inevitably make a speech about _work_ or Politics with a capital P and the rest of the lads, who were almost always in the cheerier and more raucous stages of inebriation, would inevitably respond with bread, as was appropriate. The Flitterbies had only one rule and it was this: man could not be _serieux_ as long as he was within their hallowed halls, and if this rule was broken by some poor sod, they were fair game for bread-flinging and a solid round of heckling and good-natured ragging.

But, the sum of the matter was this: Bats and he were not entirely sober when they came round to The Flitterbies that night and when they arrived, they were greeted by rousing cheers of 'Bats, Bats, Bats' because Bats was not yet persona non grata in their circles, just a dangerous indulgence. The second crucial detail was that none of the other Flitterbies were sober either. All of this would prove to be important after the fact, when they sat down to trace why and where and when things had gone disastrously wrong, but at the time this was all perfectly ordinary and perfectly acceptable. They were there to be entertained and Bats was ready to entertain. They asked him about Cambridge and he told them about The Girl. They asked him if it was true about muggle girls...? and he told them about a fellow called Marcuse. They asked him: but Bats, was it _really_ true, come on old boy don’t hold out on us. And Bats said, yes, it was true, but muggles girls were not the most interesting thing the muggles had going for them.

"Take sex for example," he said. “You’re all repressed. You all want to know what it’s like to fuck muggles, but you've been incurably infected by our fathers and their nonsense beliefs about what was it - they suck our magic out from us through our 'essence' - can't even say the word 'sperm' or else, OR ELSE - and so you'll believe anything they tell you about blood and magic and staying away from muggles at all costs - so you’ll never go out and fuck ‘em yourselves and ain’t that a fucking waste?"

"But Bats," said Freddie, genuinely distressed by this, "it’s true, you know what happened to great-great-uncle Aquila –”

“Genetic mistake, it could have happened to the purest of us,” Bats replied airily. “And besides, the muggles then ain’t like the muggles now, I’m tellin’ you. They’ve left us miles behind.”

“So what’s the grand plan then?” said Pucey, with the innocent seriousness of one who is prepared to execute a well-timed and promising rag to its very end. “Flood out on to the streets and repeat act four of the Roman expansion, Sabine women and all?”

“Abolish the Statute of Secrecy,” Bats answered. “It’s the only logical thing to do. _Then_ we get rid of all of you – all these lush club dinners and all these ridiculous crumbling ancient institutions – take a page or two or three from the muggles and become gods in our own country.”

“Man made of plastic, undying and indestructible,” Zabini murmured. “I can’t wait to be a materialist.”

Bats continued: “It’s the only path to greatness. I’ve studied the matter in great detail: they have the right idea on the continent, you know. Out with the old, in with the new and to hell with Albion and death and glory and the old bloody lie. All this la-di-da nonsense about respectability and purity and what have you – ‘s all middle class, petty bourgeoise morality. All it means is that you poor sods ent got the courage to go out and _live_ , _really_ live or do anything except stare in envy while I fuckin’ have fun. So you lot go ‘round spreadin’ rumours about how I’ve been tapped by the Russians because I ain’t sittin’ around pretendin’ we’re still better than the muggles like Gambol and his crowd - and why shouldn’t I work for the Russians or the East-German secessionists for that matter? They’ve got the right idea, haven’t they? Equality for all - economic, political, erotic freedom - well why shouldn’t a lad want to turn his back on cantankerous old cranks like Malfoy and Black and the tyranny of old age over the freshness of youth?”

“Quite right,” drawled Zabini. “Why shouldn’t he?”

“A toast,” Pucey announced, “to the death of _noblesse oblige_ and our right to irresponsible fun _sans_ consequence - to sex, money and a hard day’s rest.”

“You can laugh all you like, Pucey,” Bats said darkly, after they’d toasted themselves merrily, “but you can’t stop progress from happenin’ and even if you could there’s plenty who know a thing or two about putting people out of commission for the future.”

“My dear boy, I’m not laughing - I shake in my shoes each night thinking about the muggles and their bombs,” said Pucey.

“Wet his bed last Friday,” Parkinson added, solemnly. “Though I think that was the champers, wasn’t it Pucey?”

“It was the _R-r-r-ussians_ ,” said Pucey, rolling his r’s offensively, then quoting one of the Ministry’s educational pamphlets: “The European Threat is everywhere, it could be in _your_ bed next!”

“You’ll laugh now,” said Bats, “but you won’t be laughing when you get what’s coming to you.”

But by then the rest of the Flitterbies had moved on, a subtle, silent message that more attempts at being _serieux_ would not be tolerated and if Bats was determined to sink into the doldrums, he would be shunned politely but pointedly. Bats took the lesson in good humour and appeared to have abandoned whatever dark line of thought had clouded his mind at that moment, but clearly Dolly had underestimated the tenacity of Bats’ keen and often mercurial mind. Something about the affair must have rankled, even at the back of his mind while they made their way home - Bats to bed and him straight to the Ministry after a long cold shower.

Who could say what possessed Bats’ mind in the twelve or so hours between his departure for the Ministry and their arrival at Grey’s that evening? He gave the matter long and careful consideration after the fact and each time drew a blank. No, that was not quite right. Each time he turned the subject over in his mind, Silly Selwyn’s little threat would come back to him – along with the phantom figure of The Girl, whom he had never met and would never meet and had expressed a sincere and firm desire to never meet because however else Bats got his jollies, he was still a Lestrange of Lestrange Place and he had Standards with a capital S. It was quite possible that Higgs, that dead bore, had got to the heart of the matter right on the first try and he had made a grave, grave error in his judgement but a niggling insistent voice told him this: convictionless clever men did not simply up and throw away a lifetime of comfort, wealth and an easy job all for the sake of a girl and Bats was, if nothing else, clever and once upon a time, three years ago, convictionless.

Whatever it was, what happened when they reached Grey’s that night went like this.

They arrived at a little past eight, both still wrung out from day-long hangover they’d been labouring under. It was raining outside, so they left their umbrellas in the stand; more proof of Ministry red tape and infringements on personal freedom all for the sake of moral responsibility: the _Impervius_ was _miles_ better than an umbrella, but they had to protect the muggles’ delicate little minds so umbrellas it was. Grey’s did not employ house-elves because house-elves were stupid menial creatures who could hardly have run a gentleman’s club - so they handed their cloaks over to a young-ish boy, younger than either of them at any rate, and went inside. This made Bats frown disapprovingly but they were already being greeted by the club’s maitre’d before he could say anything and when he glanced in his friend’s direction again, Bats’ frown had been replaced by a smile that sent an involuntary shiver up his spine.

The club, of course, fell almost eerily silent when Bats and he stepped into the main room. This was part of the gambit, a thrilling and - he would reflect later - childish show of defiance. The Bright Young Things thought Bats was a lark. The older establishment were humourless, inclined towards a verdict of disownment and a label much harsher than the fond _MLCS_ they’d stuck on Bats’ forehead so far. Bats was still an eccentric if dangerous indulgence at The Flitterbies; at Grey’s, he was persona non grata – and Dolly Lestrange and his father had quarrelled over whether or not velvet robes required a monthly sum of one hundred galleons in pin money to supplement his not insubstantial income from the DIMC and the Lestrange temper ran hot and spiteful.

It was a straightforward thing. They were to go in and settle down to an ostentatious and rowdy dinner with Freddie and some of the others. There would be drinks, too many drinks, which would prompt plenty of raised eyebrows in their direction. At some point, they would fling bread around in high spirits. All of it was calculated to grate on his father’s nerves and importantly, to prove that Rodolphus Lestrange would not be bullied around by anyone, least of all his father and his antiquated views on what was and was not an appropriate sum of money to be dished out for one’s robes. There would be a row, of course, and he was fairly certain his father would threaten to horsewhip him the way he always threatened to horsewhip him and Babs at the slightest provocation - and then they would leave and his father would be eating out of the palm of his hand, if only so that his son would never set foot in his club again while he was around.

The trouble was, he had forgotten to account for - well, everything else. Grey’s was a confluence point, a place where the last of their kind converged and dined and idled and traded conversation, notes on their respective lives and jobs. History had been made at Grey’s, though rarely of the kind which found its way into their textbooks at Hogwarts. What it meant was, he had forgotten the other club members, men who would be playing spectator to the family drama unfolding before them. There was, that night, in addition to the senior Lestrange, in no particular order of importance: Travers from the DMLE, Charles Nott who was his father’s pet eccentric and the current incumbent at the DoM, Avery who owned more than fifty percent of the Prophet’s shares and a friend of his from the Russian Ministry, Abraxas Malfoy and _his_ friend, a German aristocrat who had escaped the fight on either side of the Great War, and unfortunately, impossibly, fatefully - Orion Black and good old Amycus Carrow.

Carrow was a man of very few redeeming qualities. He was a brute, a hardliner, unintelligent and like the unintelligent, possessed a few opinions he believed in ardently and too often, loudly. Even more unforgivably, he was a dead bore about it. A better man would have let well alone, but Carrow was neither better nor well-bred and so they hadn’t even found Freddie when Carrow, the bore, stuck his foot right in it.

“ _Boy_ ,” he said loudly, imperiously, folding his paper to one side, “have the rules of entry been changed or are blood traitors permitted entry now?”

“I’m sorry,” said Bats, before he could pull him away, “what did you say?”

“I thought I was quite clear,” said Carrow. “Blood traitors aren’t welcome here.”

“I thought I heard you call _me_ a blood traitor,” said Bats.

“Aren’t you?” said Carrow.

“Well it’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?” said Bats. “You think _I’m_ a blood traitor. _I_ might turn around and say _you’re_ a blood traitor.”

“There you are,” said Freddie, spilling his drink over Bats’ robes in his nervousness, “you’re late you know, we’ve been waiting for ages -”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Carrow demanded.

“- we’ve got the table and everything -”

“I mean look at the facts man - no Freddie, I won’t come quietly,” said Bats. “You’ve got blood as pure as the springs of Lourdes and a family tree that looks like old Cantankerus’ cane and yet that isn’t enough is it? For all your fine pedigree you’re as ugly as a hag’s foot and only a little cleverer than a troll and your sister’s hardly any better -”

“ _Bats_ -”

“Bastard,” hissed Carrow. “Get your wand out.”

“Now I _have_ read the club rules,” said Bats, “and while there’s nothing about blood traitors or half-breeds or even, surprisingly, about the muds, they’re strictly against duelling on the premises. The 1836 Ministerial edict against duelling, don’t you know Mucus? But then I suppose one really can’t expect much of an inbreed from the Cornish yeomanry.”

“Coward -”

“Horrid weather, isn’t it?” Freddie very nearly shrieked. “All this rain -”

Pucey, with a meaningful glance at him then Bats, murmured something in Carrow’s ear and pushed him back in his chair.

“That’s enough Bats,” he said. “You’re making Freddie nervy.”

“Poor old Freddie,” said Bats. “‘S the trouble with _les sacres_ , isn’t it? Inbred yokels like dear old Mucus on one side and on the other, aristocrats as nervy as a couple of fifth generation Abraxan thoroughbreds. Touch ‘em wrong and they’re up the wall like a couple of cats in heat - like you, Dolly. ‘Cept any breeder in their right mind would put a horse like that down -”

“- one wonders why we don’t all abandon ship for the Riviera -”

“I said that’s _enough_ Bats -”

“Fuck off, Dolly,” Bats replied. “What’s the good of being pure if you’re as sentient as a fucking troll and as high-strung as a calygreyhound? What’s your pure blood going to do for you when the muggles come for you with their bombs? It’s the twentieth century, the age of the atom - muggles! The muggles can take out an entire city with one of these - I’ve seen what they can do - your skin falls off and you vomit and vomit and vomit until you die - and that’s if you’re miles out from where the bomb hits the earth. That’s _nuclear physics_. That’s the _muggles_ for you - _let go_ Dolly - and you’re ”

“- Italy’s awfully nice this time of the year too -”

From one of the chairs: “D’ye hear that row, Avery?” - and the reply: “Too vulgar. Someone ought to do something about it.”

“Shut up,” he hissed. “Shut up _right now_ -”

“Sir, if you would come this way,” said the maitre’d, discreetly plucking at Bats’ elbow - but Bats was on his hobby horse and would not be stopped.

“But dear boy,” Bats fairly crowed with delight, grabbing the poor man’s arm, “come here, come here dear boy - this is precisely what I’m talking about. Now here is a rare intellectual, one of the precious few who can put two thoughts together and jump from A all the way to Z - clever man, our friend the major domo. His blood’s as pure as yours or mine so why does he hang around here serving drinks to brutish half-wits like Mucus? Tell us, dear boy, why do you work here?”

“I don’t think this an appropriate subject for public discussion, sir.”

“Quite right, of course,” said Bats. “The particulars would make the public’s sensibilities recoil in horror if they were known, an abhorrent violation of good taste and good breeding - well if we can’t have the details, let’s have your name man.”

“You’re going too far, Bats,” he said warningly.

“Come along, dear boy, you mustn’t be a spoilsport,” Bats said with agitated fervour. “Them’s the rules, isn’t it? We ask and you jump through the hoops - well come on man, do your job.”

“Sir,” said the maitre’d, his face twitching for the first time in nearly twenty five years of service, “I must ask you to leave.”

“Oh well done dear boy, ten points to Slytherin for solidarity in the face of all good sense, but that isn’t what I asked for,” said Bats, “here - _boy_ \- come here -”

“But I hear Transylvania’s supposed to be marvellous at this time of the year too,” Freddie continued, striving valiantly forwards.

“Here boy,” said Bats to the young man who’d taken their cloaks at the door, “tell us your name.”

“Sir,” said the boy.

“No, don’t _Sir_ me,” said Bats, “just tell us your name, that’s all - and yes, that _is_ an order.”

“- of course one hears all kinds of stories about Transylvania,” said Freddie, “and the crossing is a pain what with the muggles.”

“Yaxley,” said the boy quietly. “Thomas Yaxley.”

“Well well well,” said Bats. “Another fellow Yaxley in our ranks and in serving clothes - what do you have to say to that dear coz?”

Freddie Yaxley was silent - white-faced and silent.

“And _him_ ,” said Bats, pulling the maitre’d forward by one elbow. His voice had now reached fever pitch, the words tumbling out one on top of the other in a fiery maniacal mess. “Marius Black’s his name, better known as the shame of the Black family, the black sheep - blood as blue and true as mine and yours but for the fault of having been born a squib, he’s condemned to slave away while great big brutes like Carrow over there swan around calling people _blood traitors_ at the drop of the hat - well who’s the blood traitor here, I ask you? I’m not the one sending my own flesh and blood off to a lifetime of penal servitude all for the fault of having been born wrong - that’s treason, isn’t it? The crime of betraying one’s own people - what fucking betrayal’s worse than sending off your own flesh and blood to work like fucking house-elves? There’s a word for people like you and it goes like this: _blood traitors_ -”

Orion Black stood up.

“Marius,” said Black in his low soft voice, coolly cutting Bats as he moved forward, “have you ever found any reason to be dissatisfied with your work here?”

“No sir.”

“Has anyone treated you unkindly, or thoughtlessly, without consideration to your person or your sensibilities?”

“I wouldn’t say so, sir.”

“And you, young Thomas, I trust the pay and the accommodation is to your liking?”

“Yes sir,” said the boy.

“And you have no complaints about your treatment here?”

“No sir.”

“And you, Marius?”

“None, sir.”

“Well he can hardly speak his mind here, can he?” said Bats with a harsh laugh.

“Marius,” said Black in the blandest of tones, “the young gentleman here seems to believe you are _afraid_ of me. I trust I’ve never given you reason to suppose I should prefer flattering dishonesty over the truth, as unpalatable as it frequently is?”

“No, sir.”

“Ha,” said Bats, darkly.

“Good,” said Black, ignoring Bats, “I would be saddened, of course, to discover I provoked _fear_ in the breasts of those less fortunate than I. Come now, Marius, surely you must have some complaint to settle our young friend’s mind - we are quite open to listening to criticism. One can hardly grow as a person if one cannot stomach criticism of any sort. There must be something you find displeasing, something you’d like to see changed around here?”

“Oh yes, I’m sure he’s going to be honest with his _nephew_ and the man doling out his paycheck every month,” said Bats.

“Nothing, sir,” said the maitre’d.

“Come now,” said Black, “you can hardly expect me to believe you’ve _never_ experienced a moment’s dissatisfaction at Grey’s.”

“If I may sir, the kindness with which the members have treated us and the charity the club has shown us has always been irreproachable,” said the maitre’d. “Only a grossly miserly spirit would compel us to throw this back in the members’ faces, sir. On my part, I am quite grateful for the charitable spirit with which the club member’s have treated us.”

“Such courage,” Black said, so soft he had to strain to hear him. “Such bravery. One cannot help but admire it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Yes,” said Black, absently, then more definitely: “I think that settles the matter.”

“Does it?” Bats demanded in the direction of Black’s retreating figure. “That’s it, is it? The feudal spirit and _noblesse oblige_. He can’t fucking say a word because he knows it’s in his interest to stay mum _or else_. You’re all blood traitors, every single last one of you and you’re selling Britain by the galleon for the sake of your precious family trees, but you’ll be the first to go when we sink, y’hear that? You’ll all sink -”

“I seem to hear a noise,” said Black, from the armchair he’d sunk into. “Do you hear this noise, Rodolphus?”

“Go on, Dolly dearest,” said Bats, “tell them what goes on in that thoroughbred brain of yours - assuming anything goes on in there at all.”

“You’re making an ass of yourself,” he said, through gritted teeth.

“No,” said Bats, “you’re the ones making asses of yourselves. You ought to enjoy this fancy tomb of yours while you can, before we march you off to the slaughter.”

“It’s a very persistent noise,” said Black. “Isn’t it, Rodolphus?”

Bats watched him watching him with the smallest of grins twisting his mouth.

“The muggle, gripped by a deep sense of his or her inferiority, feeds on the pureblood’s essence thus diminishing his or her capability to feel, act or reason clearly by the means of carnal intercourse - in this regard, at least, they are no better than vampires,” he said, quoting Francis Selwyn’s seminal work, his 1860 treatise _Inquiries Into The Nature and History of Muggle-Wizard Relations_. “I think the girl’s turned your head. She’s turned you into a blood traitor. I shall have to teach her a lesson, for your sake.”

“But Dolly,” Bats said very softly, “you didn’t want anything to do with her in case just being around her drained you of your precious essence and turned you into a squib.”

Later, he would return to this moment and turn it over and over in his mind, imagining an infinite number of loops in which he brought Bats back to his senses, one in which he was not forced to bear up while Silly Selwyn flashed prim and triumphant glances at him every time they crossed paths - one in which there was no scandal, no whispers trailing along after him, no lectures from his father about the unwisdom of befriending eccentrics and above all, no rude thrust into adulthood. They were all rudely thrust into adulthood: Freddie and him and Pucey and the rest of them. The Flitterbies fell apart. An essential part of them was now persona non grata across their social sphere. They drifted, bereft and while they drifted, they became grown-ups, almost overnight. And because they were grown up, there were no more silly games of croquet in the hall and there were no more high spirited bread-flinging sprees and because there was no more of this, they splintered and fracture lines began to appear as Zabini, Pucey and Higgs drifted one way and he, Freddie and Parkinson drifted the other. It was all, in the end, Bats’ fault and Bats, damn him, had the audacity to run away to the Balkans and carry on with his life as though nothing had happened at all.

He straightened up and pushed Bats’ hand off his sleeve, where Bats had dug his fingers into his robes while insulting him.

“You’re quite right sir,” he said loudly, clearly, so they could all bloody well hear him, “there is a vilely persistent noise in here. It must be rid off.”

* * *

From: _The News Of The World_ , 8 Aug 1965

**‘BLACK MAGIC KILLED MY FRIEND’**

A surprising new twist has come to the light regarding the mysterious circumstances of the death of Cambridge student Lydia Middleham (21). A Pippa Philips, Ms Middleham’s best friend, has claimed the police are deliberately muddying the inquiries into the causes of Ms Middleham’s death in their statement that the paramedic report has been falsified. In the original report, the paramedics put Ms Middleham’s death not to drowning, but to an unspecified medical issue which prompted Ms Middleham’s heart to stop abruptly as she walked along the river’s edge on the South Bank and lose her balance, sending her toppling into the Thames.

“It was her boyfriend,” says Ms Philips, “He was weird, you know? Talked a lot about thaumaturgy and theosophy and Crowley and all that dark stuff. They were both dead serious about it. They must have been practicing or something, I don’t know. All I know’s there was a greenish light ‘round her body and the police are saying her boyfriend never existed at all. It’s black magic, it has to be, he’s a Satanist and they don’t want people to know it because they’re afraid they’ll get hysterical.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A more or less comprehensive list of things which appear in this chapter:  
> Les Sacres: a mildly derogatory term for wizarding families who appeared on Cantankerus Nott’s Sacred Twenty-Eight  
> Mister: a play on the [English Mistery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Mistery).  
> The Alliance of Muggle-Cooperative countries: largely formerly USSR countries who opted out of certain clauses of the Berlin Convention and the Statute of Secrecy, to better liaise and cooperate with their muggle governments.  
> The International Declaration of Collective Cocksucking and Sticking Our Heads Up Dumbledore’s Arse, 1945/the Berlin Convention: the same covenant, two different titles. Rodolphus is riffing on the full title of the Berlin Convention: The International Declaration of The Rights of The Wizard and the Convention on Muggle-Wizard Relations, 1945.  
> The Flitterbies: like the Drones Club, but for young wizards with a lot of private income and not a lot of brains.  
> The Infernals: members of The Inferno – a more sordid version of the Drones Club, modelled on the historical Hellfire Club.  
> Coghead: derogatory term for largely pureblood wix who promoted muggle-wix cooperation during the Industrial Revolution and advocated for the adoption of muggle technology both during the Industrial Revolution and afterwards.  
> MLCS: Muggle-loving Communist Sympathizer. Like blood traitor, but with the added benefit of also being a traitor to one’s own country.  
> Cambridge: a watering hole for cogheads and MLCS who are marginally more respectable than the wix who attend the London redbricks.  
> Redbrick: derogatory term for the London universities. Generally held to be hotbeds for blood-traitors, deviants and revolutionary radicals and therefore, frowned on by the ‘old guard’ like Rodolphus Lestrange.  
> The New European Threat: the unofficial British term for the AMC countries  
> ‘Livers: The Inimitable Livers. Like the Savoy Grill, but for wizards and with a weirder assortment of food. A creation of EssayOfThoughts'.  
> Grey’s: one of the oldest gentlemen’s clubs for wizards in England.  
> Vauxhall/Vauxhallers: the name given to the members of MI7, a reference to the fact that their HQ is down in Vauxhall.
> 
> The historical events mentioned in here in order are: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the final revelations wrt the Cambridge Five, Kim Philby's defection to the USSR (while he was working for _The Economist_ in Lebanon), the Profumo Affair  & Rhodesia's declaration of independence (by the conservative white supremacist party). The ones mentioned at a tangent are: the Beatles, Mary Quant's miniskirts coming into fashion, Herbert Marcuse & the sexual revolution, pirate radio, the BBC Light ban on most rock & pop music, the Merry Pranksters & Timothy Leary & their acid tests (tune in, drop out) and Harold Macmillan's famous declaration 'you've never had it so good before'. 
> 
> 1963 _was_ called the annus mirabilis but it was in 1967 in a poem by Philip Larkin.


	2. The Second Casualty

**iii. Mid-1967**

Fucking Berlin.

The last time she’d been here was nearly twenty years ago, loaned to the ICW by their Auror corps for a mercy mission. She’d been a rookie then, straight out of the training programme and rearing to go. The first thing her superior had told her was - _you get this out of your head right now, Auroring ain’t about chasing dark wizards down, you get your bloody orders and you do as you’re told and then you fill the paperwork out nice and proper, see?_ \- before posting her up to Berlin along with the rest of a hastily assembled peacekeeping corps. On the face of it, they were there to keep the simmering border crisis under control. In practice there was a lot less peacekeeping and a lot more “rebuilding”: Grindelwald may have preached magical unity, but peel away the layers and he was like every other bloody tyrant in history and those who’d dared stand up to him on the continent had felt the full force of his boot on their necks. They were little more than a diplomatic gambit, a sad show of British strength designed to let the continent know just who held all the strings of power now that Grindelwald was gone - and the continent hadn’t cared much for them in turn. The rest of the peacekeeping corps had eyed them with suspicion as they swanned about fresh-faced, the war only a distant rumour to them; uncles, brothers, fathers and sons who’d died but nothing more intimate, nothing more visceral. This uncomfortable tension had persisted for the full year they were in Berlin, before the Ministry pulled them back and left the continent to its own devices. By then, they no longer needed boots on the ground to make a visible show of strength: Albus Dumbledore was Supreme Mugwump in the ICW and Britain called the shots now, right from the top.

The last time she’d been here, she’d been forcibly reminded of bedraggled crows huddled together along the muggles’ telephone lines, caught out in a storm, of the way East London had lain desolate and devastated at the end of the Great War, children playing in the rubble and the ruins of what had once been their homes. That was Berlin for you. Twenty years ago lone wizards and witches in black, hunched over as they drifted busily in and out of the wreckage, had carved homes for themselves out of the half-blasted, half-falling-in-on-themselves houses, everything still a wreck five years after Grindelwald and his people had been soundly thrashed. The sky, as far as she could remember, had been an unceasing dull grey, dark clouds hanging low over the roofs and an air of perpetual gloom sitting heavy over the magical parts of the city. In some places, dark magic had left traces so thick and heady, it stung her lungs and made her sneeze several times in a row when she breathed in. In others the darkness gathered like a whirling concentrate that threatened to birth dementors and send them out, spreading darkness across the country.

Bully for them, they’d cut their teeth on Azkaban and had no trouble at all, busting into these dark wormholes - _one, two, three expecto patronum!_ \- and sending these foul bits on their way. But at the end of it, they’d done less of the rebuilding proper, less mercy, less peacekeeping and more of this: unearthing the last traces of Grindelwald and his people and weeding out the lingering dark magic. It was both an enlightening and spirit-crushing experience and, she suspected, one calculated to kill the young trainee’s ardent enthusiasm and replace it with something wiser, more hardened and cynical. Something which got the paperwork done and kept them all alive. She wasn’t sad when their orders came to go back to England. Even the dreary grey of London and the incessant roar of its traffic seemed more enticing than the stifling stillness and gloom which folded itself over the city like a thick ugly fog each night.

She’d thought she’d seen the last of Berlin when they pulled them back in the spring of 1951, but fate, it seemed, was a piece of shit and only yesterday, Travers had unceremoniously tossed a file down on her desk and said:

“Better pack your bags Bones, there’s a spot on the Transnational Floo to Berlin at 9 AM tomorrow for you. The Vauxhall chap there’ll Apparate you down once you get there - you’re pre-emptive security detail for the ICW talks at - at Freynau.”

He made a hash of the word, the Englishman’s disdain for all tongues not his own - a hash of the place too, because the actual conference was being hosted at the Nottenhaft castle in the middle of the Pleckenstein forest and everyone knew that, but presumably the word was too difficult for Travers’ very English tongue. It was the least of her concerns, however. If the rumours were right, Travers was involved in a Malfoy grab for power - and if Travers was involved in a Malfoy grab for power, the last thing the Minister needed was for her to be posted away in the middle of fuck-all in Germany, being bored to death by diplomats of every stripe. The Minister was a man with grand dreams, but little common-sense, even fewer friends and enemies across departments, snarling on his doorstep like ravening werewolves.

It was the unfortunate corollary of having a muggleborn in office for the first time in history.

“But I’m security detail for the Minister,” she said, wondering who’d whispered what in Leach’s ear to set these wheels turning. “Liaison with Vauxhall.”

“You can take that up with the Minister,” he said. “He wants you _personally_ keeping an eye on things in Germany.”

The Minister proved intractable.

“I don’t trust that fellow,” he told her, digging his hands into his pockets, looking, for all the world, like an overgrown schoolboy. “Black - and that boy who follows him around - Lestrange, is it? - they’re up to something of some sort and I don’t trust anyone else in the DMLE to chase it down. They’re all bloody terrified of Travers and _I’m_ bloody terrified of old Mad-Eye.”

“With all due respect, Minister -”

“With all due respect, Ms Bones, this is the twentieth century and I am the Minister for Magic in Britain - my detractors are hardly going to poison my meals or have me murdered by some clandestine means. Your concern for my wellbeing is noted, but I must have you at the conference on Adlershorst.”

“And anyway,” he added, grinning at her, “you’ll have Mr Moody to bully me while you’re gone. Constant vigilance, heh?”

So, fucking Berlin. Still miserable, still deathly silent, even if this time ‘round the sun was filtering weakly through a thin film of clouds scattered across the sky and even if this time ‘round she wasn’t tramping around with a badge declaring her a member of the ICW peacekeeping force, British and foreign and here to strongarm the continent into docilely accepting British supremacy. This time the city’s misery was down to the muggles and their war games. The sharp prickling trace of dark magic over the city was gone more or less and Grindelwald and his people were all safely locked up in a fortress down south, but something far worse had taken its place.

“You haven’t seen the wall yet, have you?” said Scrimgeour, conversationally. “It’s an ugly business - the whole thing was an ugly business. They didn’t bother with continuing the rebuilding once they signed Berlin off, just stripped it all down and handed it over to the muggles and waltzed out, pleased as punch. You wouldn’t have seen that though - they packed the ICW and the peacekeeping corps off before they did it.”

Rufus Scrimgeour, tall and leonine and ever so slightly intimidating, scowled fiercely at a young Ministry employee and startled the poor man into dropping the papers he was carrying.

“The whole place stinks of dark magic,” he continued, as the young man hastily swept up his papers and scurried out of their way. “Poor buggers can’t spend a day without being reminded of Grindelwald and his people. You can’t really blame the secessionists. Y’know what the German Minister said when he’d finished signing off on this mess? _Good riddance to bad rubbish_. And not a single person tried to stop him - here this way, I’ll Apparate you there, if you’ll take my arm - yes - ready?”

They landed in a tiny cobblestone alleyway sandwiched between two crooked houses. The lone Auror posted at this Apparation point, slouching against the wall and smoking like a chimney, eyed them lazily before nodding at Scrimgeour in silent recognition. Apparently this was all he needed, because he went right back to smoking and thumbing through a little book he was holding. Not like he needed to be on full alert: the whole place was silent and deserted. The rustle of their robes against their coats was the only sound she could hear - everything was still, unnaturally still and heavy and the air thrummed strongly with magic: the same magic she thought she'd left behind seventeen years ago. Except this time it was condensed and squeezed into this tiny sliver of land running down the centre of this city.

“Circe’s tits,” she murmured, turning to look at the ugly concrete and barbed wire edifice.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

“So much for Albus Dumbledore,” she said. “We wouldn’t have left if we’d known this was how they were going to solve the crisis, you know?”

“Dumbledore,” he replied darkly. “Nevermind Dumbledore. You wouldn’t have had a say in the matter anyway, that’s how it always is with Albus Dumbledore. Come on - this way.”

He turned left down a narrow cul-de-sac and she followed, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her robes, trunk floating along behind her.

“Mind you,” he said, “you wouldn’t have had a say in the matter, Dumbledore or otherwise. The worst thing he’s done is nothing at all and nothing’s a great deal better than half the things I’ve seen.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “Nothing’s pretty bad when there’s hundreds dying because you don’t want to face an old mate of yours.”

“‘S better than the things I’ve seen,” he said stubbornly.

He slipped his wand out from his sleeve and traced a pattern in the wall at the end of the cul-de-sac. For a moment the brick wall stayed solid-looking. Then all of a sudden, it shimmered and faded in the middle, like a painting washed out in the middle. Only, on the other side were cobbled roads and old wooden-beam houses of the magical quarter instead of the blank white of an empty canvas.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she asked him as they crossed over into the magical quarter. The streets were still empty-ish, though there was more life on this side than on the other - more witches and wizards hustling along on business and shops, offices, a couple of restaurants with people outside them, one lonely cafe and in the middle of the square, a mostly empty beergarten.

“Hurry up or we’ll be late,” he said gruffly, striding away down the main street. “We’re meeting Rostov at Checkpoint Charlie.”

“What the hell was that supposed to mean, Scrimgeour?” she demanded, hurrying to catch up with him.

He remained silent, though she could see a muscle in his jaw working as he strode on grimly.

“I’ve got a job to do, in case it’s escaped your attention,” she said. “If there’s something I ought to know, you’d bloody well better tell me now, Scrimgeour and to hell with your Vauxhall bullshit.”

“They didn’t bother with any spring-cleaning once you lot from the ICW moved out,” he said elliptically. “Have to be careful what you’re telling whom or you could end up in a lot of trouble.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Use your brains Bones,” he said irritably. “Why d’you think the secessionists want to leave? It ain’t just because the Ministry’d sell their own grandmothers for a knut. Bloody place is riddled through and through with Grindelwald’s people, from the bottom all the way to the top. Dumbledore’s a coward alright, always looking the other way, but at least he ain’t a Grindelwald fanatic and at least he won’t lock you up because you won’t toe his line. Can’t even sodding use your wands in some part of the city without someone from the Ministry breathing down your neck and the Minister just bleats about how it has to do with the muggles when the muggles ent even half interested in us.”

“And the ICW doesn’t want to look too hard or else people might start looking at them,” she said. “And then they’d start asking difficult questions.”

“Well done,” he said. “Fucking irony, isn’t it? The Berlin Convention don’t hold water in Berlin. Almost makes me want to go to church sometimes.”

She snorted. “So what’s the plan?”

He indicated an ugly cream building at the end of the road. “Coffee and we watch Rostov put on a show.”

The Café Nachtkrapp was, appropriately, a dark and poky, poorly-lit place that made several of the more dodgy establishments on Knockturn Alley look respectable by comparison. Their table was unpleasantly sticky and the straggly bunch of carnations in the table’s centrepiece were days old, dried up and wrinkled. In the corner, an old and decrepit gramophone cranked out a jazz record that must have been nearly sixty years old at half-speed, every crackle and chord stretched out in painful excruciating wails, caught somewhere between the sleazy and the sinister. Even the windows, despite their unhampered view of the checkpoint, were irredeemable - filthy, caked with at least five years’ worth of dirt _and_ tinted dark to boot. But it was the hub of all the important comings and goings between this part of the city and the next, now that the only way to travel into Berlin was either by the Floo from France or Britain, or strictly licensed portkeys and the various checkpoints across the city, and _that_ made this place - according to Scrimgeour, anyway - Important: a watering hole for Ministry dignitaries and diplomats waiting on arrivals from the other side.

At this hour, however, the place was mostly empty which made _them_ conspicuous. Its only occupants were the moody looking waitress, one long-faced young man clearly nursing a hangover over his cup of coffee and at a table in the corner, a solitary Auror in the regulation navy blue robes favoured by the German Ministry, scowling blankly into space and with a crumbling cigarette in his right hand. He was the third Auror she’d counted hanging around St Albertstrasse - a change from London. You had to be lucky to spot an Auror hanging around on Diagon Alley in the middle of the day outside of the lunch hour. It was one of the laws of the profession. You simply never were in the right place at the right time, least of all when you were wanted most. In fact, most of the time, the Auror on duty at Diagon Alley could be found ‘information-gathering’ in the Ministry canteen. Berlin clearly was a different cup of tea and this was not surprising, even if it was unnerving: the place _was_ an anti-Apparation zone, except for the few Ministry-approved Apparation points. Whether people _followed_ those rules on this side was a different question altogether.

If Rufus was worried by the man’s presence, he didn’t show it. He just sat there half-staring out of the window, half reading the menu.

“Ihren Kaffee,” said the waitress, landing a cup - not too gently, either - in front of her.

“Danke.”

“There,” said Scrimgeour, nodding at the window. “He’s here.”

 _Here_ was the length between their checkpoint and the other side. A muggle car, black or possibly a very dark blue, with darkened windows, was moving slowly from one side to the other. Theoretically, this was a tense and exciting moment. People had been caught, shot, killed doing this stretch. Next to her, Scrimgeour unconsciously drummed his fingers on the table, out of time with the music wailing melancholically in the background. In actual fact, the whole thing was anticlimactic. The car slid smoothly through to the checkpoint on their end. No sirens, no alarms, no muggles pointing guns at things - nothing at all. A slim hand was extended from a window and the soldier flipped through the papers extended by this hand with an almost careless ease, before waving the car through to their side. And that was that.

Even the wall, she reflected silently, was a great deal more impressive than this. But whatever the crossing lacked in style and impressiveness, Scrimgeour’s contact more than made up for.

 _He_ was tall, slim, blond, late-twenties possibly pushing thirty, in a light grey three-piece suit paired with an absurdly flashy pair of sunglasses - tortoise-shell, she realized, as the sun caught in them for a moment. The phrase matinee-idol good looks came to mind, the kind of thing her old schoolmate Phyllida was going on about: non-moving posters of cool but handsome men, singularly without any expression on their faces except a kind of arrogant self-assurance of their worth, of - well, whatever the hell went through the minds of men when they stared intently into the middle distance in all those photographs. _So manly_ , Phyllida would say with a sigh. Personally, she preferred the girls who slouched and pouted on the covers of the muggle magazines with their lithe, athletic forms and their elaborately coiffed hairdos - and those dresses which fell so delightfully over their forms, unlike the largely shapeless robes they were so fond of.

Though the minirobes everyone favoured were an _excellent_ improvement on the old kind, if she was honest.

“Scrimgeour,” he said, with an easy and charming smile and an immaculate American drawl.

Decidedly handsome. Phyllida would have been decidedly swoony. _And knows it_ , she added mentally as the man turned his smile on her.

“Rostov,” said Scrimgeour, not sounding very friendly at all. “Bones, this is Alexei Rostov, our chief you know what, on that side. Rostov, this is _her_.”

Her eyebrows shot up at this unorthodox and ungrammatical introduction. The fact that Scrimgeour had been talking about her long before she left London made her – well damn it, he was a Vauxhaller and dodginess would have been hammered into his nature by the fellows down in MI7, but this dispelled the notion that this was purely a last minute decision by the Minister.

“Pleased to meet you, Rostov,” she said as he took her hand and squeezed, holding it for a few moments too long. “Scrimgeour never told me he’d written to you about me.”

“Please - call me Alyosha,” he replied. “It’s too bad of him. He didn’t tell me you were this beautiful either. Scrimgeour, I’m disappointed in you - we’re both disappointed in you -”

“Nice try,” said Scrimgeour dryly, “but you’re not to play your tricks on her, Rostov.”

“I can’t help it, I’m only a man,” said Call-Me-Alyosha, winking wickedly at her, “She’s got that quintessential English beauty about her - what d’you call it? English rose.”

She snorted as Scrimgeour squinted suspiciously at her.

“I’m a big girl,” she told him. “I can take care of myself.”

“I promise you, my intentions are all honourable,” said Call-Me-Alyosha. “Scout’s honour, I swear.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Scrimgeour replied, even drier. Then, once Call-Me-Alyosha had settled into his chair and ordered himself a coffee: “what gives, Rostov? What the hell’s going on?”

Her eyes slid automatically to the Auror in the corner. He still seemed to be in a world of his own, had barely even registered Call-Me-Alyosha when he came in, was still staring off into the middle of nowhere even though his cigarette had nearly half burnt out, scattering ash on his table and the floor around him. But of course, if he was eavesdropping on behalf of the German Ministry, what better way to disguise it than by playing stupid?

“I’m not sure,” she began, before cutting off mid-sentence as Call-Me-Alyosha shook his head subtly.

“You think this is bad,” he said, leaning towards her and pointedly ignoring Scrimgeour, “you should see the other side. Cigarette?”

 _And sharp_ , she added to herself, taking a cigarette from the proffered packet. Across from her, Scrimgeour tried to make a discreet study of the Auror in his corner while picking at invisible lintel on the shoulder of his robes.

“I haven’t been on the other side,” she said, as he lit their cigarettes with the tip of his wand. “Is it that terrible?”

He smiled. “The shops only open for half the day, the curfew starts at six and there are Aurors on every block. You see, it’s all Ministry business - going to the shops, going to school, going to your neighbour’s house for a cup of sugar - and what’s Ministry business is muggle business. Apparating without a license gets you three years in the Ministry prison, assuming the muggles choose not to take a personal interest in you - danke - and Merlin forbid you leave your curtains open during the day unless you want your neighbours spying on you with secondhand omniculars.”

To her horror, he put not one or two, but four lumps of sugar in his coffee and stirred.

“That does sound terrible,” she said.

“The muggles call it the most dangerous place in the world,” he said. “Or at least they used to. I’d just like to have coffee without having to surrender my wand for inspection each time I go out to buy some. But I guess it’s a small price to pay for the opportunity of meeting you.”

“Flatterer,” she said. “I was under the impression you had to be important to cross from one side to the other with so much ease, so you can’t be all that helpless.”

Scrimgeour shook his left sleeve out and began fiddling with his watch, his wand peeking out from underneath the cloth.

“Not entirely, no,” Call-Me-Alyosha admitted. “I’m what you call moderately important in places where it helps to be moderately important, if you know what I mean.”

“And they don’t mind you talking them down in public?” she said, stubbing her cigarette in the ashtray and shaking her own sleeves out. The hands on her watch pointed to nine AM which meant it must have been around ten and she made a mental note to wind it at the earliest opportunity. “I heard they were dishing out sentences left, right and center for the slightest hint of sedition.”

“Not if you’re with the American embassy,” he drawled. “Even _Dumbledore_ couldn’t get the ICW to bend the rules against the MACUSA.”

“Or if you’re a witch-watcher,” Scrimgeour murmured. “On my count.”

“Not _just_ a witch-watcher,” said Call-Me-Alyosha.

“One.”

“So what are you exactly?” she asked him, the wood of her wand rough and uneven in her right hand as she gripped it tight, the thrill of it all finally getting to her.

“Two.”

He lightly tapped his cigarette against the side of the ashtray, then tossed the butt into it.

“Captain Alexei Anatolievich Rostov,” he said, dropping the accent and the act together, “KGB, at your service.”

At the corner table, the Auror shook himself out of his stupor, flicked his cigarette into the ashtray, stood and headed towards the door on the St Albertstrasse side.

“Really,” she said, unimpressed.

“Three,” said Scrimgeour.

The Auror never made it to the door - Rostov rose and in a single graceful, fluid movement placed himself between the Auror and the door.

“Cigarette?” he said in German, holding out his packet of cigarettes. He flashed the Auror a charming grin, pointed his wand with his other hand at the Auror’s head and said: “Obliviate.”

“That’s our cue,” said Scrimgeour, rising from his chair.

He took the young waitress, still staring round-eyed in Rostov and the Auror’s direction, which left her the young man nursing his hangover, now looking around him open-mouthed, stunned by the proceedings.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, pointing her wand at him. “Obliviate.”

His eyes went blank, hands still holding his cup of coffee - a mercy he’d been too stunned, too out of it to reach for his wand and make this any messier.

“No?” Rostov told the young Auror, sounding disappointed as he flipped the packet shut. “Ah well, have a good day.”

They watched him stumble out into the main road in a daze.

She turned to Rostov. “Are you - I mean - really?”

“Really,” he said, lightly mocking, “Captains don’t get special dispensations to travel West. What now, Rufus?”

“Munich,” said Scrimgeour, grimly. “You can fill us in on the way now we’ve lost our rat tail.”

* * *

**iv. Late-1967**

Mount Adlerhorst was hardly a _mountain_ in the strictest sense of the word. The word conjured up images of snow-topped Alps or the grand and imposing peaks of the Himalayas or even that old, natural wall between the East and the West the muggles had strived to imitate - the Urals; and Mount Adlerhorst was none of these. It was not even particularly very tall when held up to its sister peaks, the nearby Dreisesselberg and the Bavarian Plöckenstein, clocking in at a mere eight hundred and sixty seven meters to their one thousand meter high peaks. But it was special for two reasons. One, it was where the German, Austrian and Bohemian-Moravian borders met - the eastern side of the mountain descended into Bohemia-Moravia or Czecho, as the muggles called it - and therefore, as close to neutral ground they were going to get. Two, it rose at a steep incline, nearly straight up from the ground which made it almost impossible to ascend except by flight, or by an ancient Nottenhaft’s complex rabbit’s wren of tunnels and pulleys and levers that travelled straight up through the heart of the mountain and therefore, made it the safest place to hold a round of peacebuilding talks which had every single chance of going dangerously awry.

The third less obvious fact in its favour was the castle perched on the mountain’s summit and this, no doubt, was the most important fact in the minds of the various delegates and diplomats who had gathered here for the peace talks. The only exception to the rule might have been the secessionists, who all seemed to share the ascetic’s hatred for luxury of any kind and who viewed the castle in the same light someone would view a child murderer. Schloss Rabenstein was an impressive edifice, a monstrosity built almost entirely out of black granite and assembled by magic: only magic could have hefted those large bricks up the mountainside and assembled them so neatly and precariously along the mountain’s long, narrow summit. It was one of the principal attractions of magical Germany and the principal seat of the Nottenhaft family for nearly ten centuries running - and they never let anyone forget it. While the rest of the houses of Germany, still grappling with unification of 1910 and suddenly, uncomfortably aware that their hero was a tyrant bent on their destruction, fell one by one to Grindelwald’s armies, Schloss Rabenstein alone stood strong, tall and impregnable except by the narrow approach road and by air. Grindelwald had given the castle up in the end, chasing after low hanging fruit and the eastern marches of Bavaria had escaped, relatively unscathed.

(There were rumours which persisted about deals cut and treaties signed in stealth which explained Grindelwald’s poor, halfhearted attempts at capturing the castle. Nothing had come of this however and without material proof, it was difficult to accuse a man of collaboration and magisupremacy. Besides, nearly half the officialdom were magisupremacists anyway, whatever the words they used to dress it up. For the greater good, her fucking foot.)

For centuries the castle had withstood enemies of every kind, from the greedy nearby duchys, invading kingdoms, dark wizards and the Great Tyrant himself. Its wards had withstood every single kind of assault and battery, cursebreakers and cursemakers. It had even withstood a couple of misfired bombs from the three different sides of the muggle war. _Two_ wars, rather, along with the muggles and their planes and zeppelins and their frankly ridiculous assortment of bombs and other arsenal.

And now, in nineteen sixty-seven, someone had successfully soiled Schloss Rabenstein’s clean track record and staged an assassination attempt on Orion Black using one of those time-delayed Howler bombs wizards in Africa and the South Asian subcontinent had favoured during their Independence struggles.

The British contingent stayed, despite the finger-pointing and the hawkish claims of sabotage - and a lot of wand-waving and threats to pack up and leave on the spot from the French, who, as usual, had nothing to worry about but were keen on making a noise about it anyway. To give in, said Black, would play straight into their hands.

“And we are nothing,” he told them, “if not bloody stubborn, as our continental cousins put it. One might as well live up to one’s reputation for bloodymindedness if one’s going to be so insulted. No, we won’t let them bully us into leaving.”

The current Graf von Nottenhaft, commiserative and considerate, agreed that yes, one could not bow to terror and one had to stand strong, one was made of sterner stuff after all - but would they all prefer moving to the Blue Suite in the west wing perhaps?

“The view from the Suite charming,” he said. “And you will all be able to continue your work undisturbed while the Aurors continue their investigation.”

He was right. The view from the Blue Suite was charming, even if the suite itself was overwhelmingly _blue_ , too blue for her tastes, personally: blue furnishings, blue curtains, even a sodding cuckoo clock painted in sky blue on the wall. The windows of their impromptu HQ overlooked the Bavarian side of the mountain, a soothing and pleasant view of granite stone broken by maudlin green scrubbery and the anemic white trunks and dark green branches of the tree, though right now it was an unbroken sea of white and dark green that was almost black against the bright, white of the snow. A hundred feet below them, the Grünsbach tumbled down the mountain, a thin white line which swelled into a deep, bright arctic blue stream by the time it reached the forest below. Right now, the view was hazy, blurred in part by the gentle flurry of snowflakes, and the light mist drifting along down over the mountainside.

“I’ve sent to the Department of Mysteries for a man to investigate,” Black was saying, as he stood by the window looking down on the Grünsbach. “The Germans are efficient, of course, but not incorruptible. They say he should be down here by tomorrow.”

She hummed agreement, despite her misgivings. Such a show of nationalistic jingoism - our boys do it better, _indeed_ \- would hardly soothe the feathers ruffled by this whole mess. But he wanted a specialist on the job and by Merlin he was going to have it and teach them their lesson, or else his name wasn’t Orion fucking Black.

“You’ll have to take him under your wing,” he said. “Show him around the place, get him used to splendour.”

He smiled and Amelia, only by sheer force of will, pushed the corner of her mouth up in a tight smile, nerves raw despite herself. Scrimgeour didn’t even try. Bully for him, he could afford his frowns with all that MI7 nonsense. The failure to prevent such a grave act of violence, even if it was a failed one, was hardly going to sit well with the Ministry back home. She could picture the Minister now, in a tizzy, as the _Prophet_ and the _Sol_ screamed hysterically about security, Ministerial inefficiency, the Ministry’s inability to take care of their own: just about anything under the sun they could pin on the Minister and the Ministry as though fate wasn’t a bugger with a mind of its own. In the end though, it was her head on the line along with Scrimgeour’s and their careers depended on whether or not Black was going to be a vindictive bastard about it, or accept that some things were beyond their control.

And things _were_ beyond their control. There was a leak somewhere in their neat little ring of hm, _friends_ , whether Scrimgeour liked it or not.

“The whole thing’s made a damn mess of it all,” Black continued. “Lestrange, pass the biscuits around, won’t you, there’s a good fellow. Everyone seems to think it was the East Germans and the East Germans claim it’s a Zoucheist plot -”

Lestrange held the plate of biscuits out for her, sulky expression marring his aristocratic features. _Like a sulky overbred horse_ , Rostov had said, a little meanly. The boy could hardly expect to occupy any other position except over-glorified secretary, but it was clear it sat badly with him. She felt vaguely sorry for him. Humility was a virtue, but serving biscuits was hardly what you’d call job satisfaction, especially if you’d been raised to think the world was your oyster as a child.

“But you know all that,” said Black, coming away from the window and sitting on an uncomfortable looking gilded sofa. He folded his hands over his knee and studied them for a moment. “So I won’t insult you by repeating the details. I’m far more concerned about the talks themselves - no, not the process, the process is fine, but I must say, the Russians and the secessionists seem to be remarkably prescient.”

“Prescient?” Scrimgeour repeated.

“Yes,” said Black. “These are peace talks, of course - there’s no question of it being a _struggle_ against other countries. We are all here for the same purpose, one presumes. But it is disheartening, nevertheless, to have all our best efforts at negotiation shot down in favour of the hard line the German - what was his name again, Lestrange?”

“Stauber, sir.”

“Stauber - and Glinsky, we can’t forget the Russians now, can we?” he said with a sigh. “They seem to know exactly what we’re about to propose, how we propose to execute it and what concessions we’re ready to make, with the result that we’re being made to look like unreasonable fools instead of the other way around - which means the swing vote countries - those hot-blooded types - won’t choose one way or the other.”

“They could have acquired a seer,” Scrimgeour said, absolutely straight-faced.

She hurriedly lifted her cup of tea and took an over-large sip to hide her grin.

Black was unperturbed. “Perhaps. In my experience, however, seers - even the best ones like Madame Vablatsky - deal in vagaries and however well our neighbours may have predicted our position, they could hardly be well-versed with the kind of information you so kindly draft up for me every week in your intelligence reports.”

He took one of the jam scones ( _a la Anglaise_ , though as far as she could tell there was no difference between the ‘English’ scones and the continental ones) their host had thoughtfully provided them - _ah yes, it is good to have the comforts of home far from home and I know you English are very fond of the comforts of home_ \- and ate, too blandly unemotional for her comfort.

“Ah,” said Scrimgeour.

“Yes, ah, indeed, Mr Scrimgeour,” said Black.

Rages were understandable. Travers raged, frequently and bad-naturedly. His rages inevitably left everyone in the department in a bad temper which carried on for weeks at a stretch. The Minister raged too, but in a good-natured sort of way - they passed quickly and left him in a conciliatory and apologetic mood which his boyish charm made almost impossible to resist. Black’s well-bred blankness was an enigma, one which left them all at sea and entirely at his mercy. If ever there was a case for the other side having got hold of a seer, it was their ability to read the man well enough to stall him.

“It could be counterintelligence,” she said. “I understand the other side specializes in it.”

“I would imagine the purpose of intelligence,” he said, even more blandly, “is to be intelligent. One assumes a certain level of discretion goes hand in hand with it.”

She winced.

“Your friend, Rostov,” Black asked Scrimgeour, taking a sip from his cup of tea. “Is he sound?”

Scrimgeour frowned as he considered the question.

This was the trick question: _was_ Rostov sound. The thought had begun to worry at her ever since Mad-Eye had sent them that cryptic memo via the Transnational Floo, using an old, abandoned code from the Great War once they’d translated it from the ancient Aramaic.

 _I have a new friend_ [ _pet_ was the most obvious translation here, something denoting location and proximity at the very least] _digging-blind-mouse_ [ _mole_ , said Scrimgeour, _damn him_ ], _a friendly_ [ _well it has to be friendly_ , she reasoned, _Mad-Eye doesn’t repeat himself unnecessarily_ ] _animal. I have not slept with its squeaking_ [ _damn, damn damn_ , said Scrimgeour] _but it is a small price to pay for having a new friend. The friends_ [ _office_ , she said, after a moment’s deliberation, _has to be office_ ] _worship him_.

Was Rostov sound? The best answer she could give was a roundabout one, an excursion into the complicated histories - too often too political - which mapped their lives now.

“Dumbledore this, Dumbledore that,” he had said disparagingly, three weeks ago, while they were assessing the wards on the castle. “The way your lot goes on, you’d think he won the war singlehandedly for you.”

“But -” she’d began to say, naively, before Rufus cut her off.

“Rostov was at Moscow,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Yes,” said Rostov, bitterly. “I was at Moscow. Yes, the British – Dumbledore – won the war – and thousands of my brothers and sisters died, breaking the backs of Grindelwald’s army – but you don’t hear about that do you? But I was there and I saw Moscow’s dead and I saw Moscow’s dead rise too and I saw – oh many terrible things, let’s not talk about it, look at the snow, the first fall of snow, that’s what’s important. Beauty, happiness, the first fall of snow. Christmas – ah Christmas. I wonder if the Graf’s hospitality extends to glühwein.”

He hated Dumbledore. He hated Grindelwald. He hated the witches and wizards who had supported Grindelwald, not merely actively, but complicitly too. He was a patriot.

Was Rostov sound? _Yes, unreservedly, yes_. Rostov the irreverent and incorrigible flirt was the first layer, the first larger-than-life matryoshka doll. Underneath was another doll, Rostov the spy, the KGB officer, this one less expansive, pruned and perfected into a weapon. Beneath: Rostov the patriot, fiercely intelligent and bitter and passionate and in love with his country, the most dangerous doll of all. And beneath that ---

“The soundest,” said Scrimgeour. “I’d trust him with my life.”

If Black was dissatisfied with this answer he didn’t show it. However, Lestrange, who was transparent as well as a sulky well-bred horse, scowled at this.

She filed this away for later.

“Well I suppose you know best,” said Black - and she relaxed. Scrimgeour and she would keep their jobs, for now. “It could all just be an unpleasant coincidence. More tea?”

\--

The young man from the DoM arrived later that evening, before the promised tomorrow, and Scrimgeour took an instant dislike to him. She supposed it was the hair and the robes: his hair was long and untidy in the muggle style and his robes were an absurd lime-green shagpile – and then there was, of course, the frankly ridiculous moustache. Scrimgeour insisted it was not.

“Philby,” the boy had said, with an easy smile and a firm handshake. “Tony Philby.”

“I don’t trust him,” said Scrimgeour. “What kind of a name is Philby? Never heard of it on a wizard.”

Men could be so irrational sometimes.

“You’re not being fair,” she told him. “Just because he’s been called in to do half our job for us.”

“There’s no need to get all Hufflepuff about it,” he said. “He thinks the secessionists have the right idea.”

“I thought you were sympathetic.”

“Sympathetic, yes. Supportive, _no_. I’m a Ministry man through and through Bones.”

“And besides,” Scrimgeour added a few moments later, “he’s too bloody likeable. Nobody’s that nice, ‘specially not DoM and I’ll tell you this – no one, no one goes around offering their opinions on politics unasked for.”

“He’s just trying to be friendly,” she said. “Helga’s heart, you’re as bad as old Mad-Eye.”

The most irritating part of this was that Scrimgeour was right, damn him. Despite her best efforts to be fair-minded, something about the boy’s open-face and gentle, innocent eyes made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. All the talk about leaks and coincidences were getting to her. There were plenty of sweet-tempered people in the world, even among the cursebreakers and the DoM’s mad scientists - maybe even more in the DoM where reality was relative and everyone lived strange and inaccessible lives, wrapped up in their research.

She pondered this as she took a drag on her cigarette, not really taking in the sight of the wintery Bavarian landscape laid out below the terrace she was standing on. A distant part of her noted it was postcard pretty; she would have to purchase one down in the village to send to Marlene. But Marlene, as much as she adored her, was far away and in England while she was here in Germany and with the problem of the attempted assassination on her hands - and a partially misfired bomb. No one had claimed responsibility for it as yet which meant the motives remained unclear. If the new boy was not just sympathetic, but supportive of the secessionists did that make him corruptible? How dangerous did this make him? Philby had prodded and poked the half-exploded chest with a grave expression, hemmed and hawed and then decided he needed more time with his books to make a diagnosis.

Amelia sighed and dropped her cigarette, grinding it out underneath her heel. The German winter was something else entirely, she thought, stuffing her hands into her pockets. Pretty, but too bloody cold. It made even the endless rain and rare, occasional snows of Pen Rhionydd seem enticing. Flu was miles better than frozen fingers and noses, though admittedly the Graf was much more generous with the central heating than the folks back home were. Something they could all learn from the Germans. She balled her hands up into fists in a vain attempt to make the warming charms work faster - _you’ll need gloves_ , Scrimgeour’s voice echoed in her head, _don’t say I didn’t warn you when you catch frostbite_ \- and was about to pull the door into the castle open when, through a chink in the thick dark brocade curtains pulled across the french windows, she saw Lestrange grab Philby by the arm and pull him towards the windows.

She stepped back hastily to the side and into the dark, then pressed her ear against the glass.

“What do you mean, what the hell are you doing here?” she heard Philby say. “I’ve got a bloody job, Dolly.”

 _Dolly_ \- the young intern Jugson’s nasal whine rang loud and clear: _But Dolly Lestrange says_ \- and then young Cicely Selwyn snapping - _Dolly Lestrange can go fuck himself for all I bloody care_. That _was_ interesting.

“- _traitor_ ,” Lestrange snarled, earlier words too muffled to be heard.

She edged out, trying to catch a glimpse of the two from behind the curtains.

“- black and white,” Philby’s voice filtered through. “- _you_ , a traitor.”

“ _How dare you_.”

“- perfectly why.”

More indefinite mumbling - and as she inched across, the curtain moved for a second, not enough to reveal her but enough to reveal the two boys, standing almost toe to toe - Philby with a sly smile, looking slightly up at the taller Lestrange who was caught between glowering black rage and -

Something much more intimate, she realized with a shock. Something not very unlike the way Marlene looked at her sometimes, the times which ended with them laughing together breathlessly --

“You’re wrong,” Lestrange said fiercely, leaning closer.

And then Philby, so low she would have missed it if she wasn’t so sure already what his words would be, because the answer was plastered all over the Lestrange boy’s transparent, overbred horse-face.

“I don’t think so.”

Well - that _was_ interesting. A Lestrange of Lestrange Place and a young, undoubtedly muggleborn boy - the rags would have a field day if they could get their hands on it, put a stopper in the Black-Lestrange union that was to happen once the eldest Miss Black left Hogwarts. But that hardly concerned her, the Lestrange boy could fuck horses for all she cared. No, it was the choices of words which had opened the conversation which interested her.

She leaned against the wall, the cold forgotten, and lit herself another cigarette and pondered Lestrange leaning forward and snarling the word _traitor_ in Philby’s face.

\--

“You don’t think there’s something to this?” she asked Scrimgeour the next day during their early morning patrol of the castle’s grounds, usually a short brisk walk that took a little more than twenty minutes - three quarters of an hour if they included a sweep of the terraced gardens in their rounds. Today was Sunday, however, and they had had another cryptic memo from Mad-Eye and whether they liked it or not, Mad-Eye’s paranoia was infectious. The snow was falling heavily now, after easing off during the night, and it made the place seem eerily dead: no birds, no rustling branches, no wind, not even the sound of the rushing Grünsbach. Only the vague distant sound of dolorous Latinate chanting - church for the religious - broke the silence from somewhere in the castle above. It was perfect, Mad-Eye himself could have hardly done better at a last minute’s notice: Sunday morning, no eavesdroppers and whole place silent as a bloody graveyard because of the snow.

“He hasn’t had access to our reports,” said Scrimgeour. “He can’t be _our_ leak.”

“Not our leak,” she replied. “Mad-Eye’s.”

“Mad-Eye sees Grindelwaldian conspiracies in the way old Travers sneezes,” Scrimgeour said, darkly. “And we don’t know that our leak isn’t his leak.”

“You said -”

“No, look here, Bones,” said Scrimgeour, coming to an abrupt stop in front of the portico. “Black says it’s my report being leaked to the secessionists who are being backed by the Russians. That’s not a leak, that’s a fucking waterfall. You know as well as I do that the reports go to Black _alone_ on this side - _and_ it’s all in code. Fine - suppose Lestrange decodes it for him, that’s two people on this side. But the reports don’t just stop here -”

“They go back to London,” she finished. “That leaves the telegram boy -”

“On both sides.”

“The telegram boys,” she said, counting off, “Your decrypter, Weatherby, Travers, the Minister - and your - _superior_ -”

“Who we’ll just call _P_ for now -”

“P,” she paused. “And of course, anyone who comes in to clean the offices down at the Ministry, the entire Auror Office and all our liaisons with the various departments, _including_ the Department of Mysteries - it’s not watertight, Rufus - it could be anyone with a good head for crosswords and Ancient Runes in any of these departments - that’s nearly fifteen or sixteen witches and wizards.”

“I’m just _saying_ -”

“You were the one who said you didn’t trust Philby.”

“Merlin’s balls, what in Salazar’s name is someone like Travers or Nott going to do with an idiot – MLCS, yes bloody hell Bones, what other word is there for it? A muggleborn and a secessionist supporter – stands to reason he’s one of those bloody communists too, like Inkpin. And one of those squib agitators, no doubt. It doesn’t fit.”

She blew irritably at a loose strand of hair that had fallen into her eye. “All right, what’s your theory?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“It’s not about me bloody liking it, it’s about getting to the bottom of this fucking mess,” she told him. “So that one, we keep our jobs and two, we don’t inadvertently screw our own bloody country over.”

He turned and started walking again. “Come on, keep up. Can’t let Black think we’re any shoddier than we are.”

They walked in silence for nearly half-a-minute, turning the corner to the more deserted southern side of the castle, before Scrimgeour began again.

“Mad-Eye and I fought together in the war, all right?” he said. “I was – oh, younger than Lestrange. Mad-Eye was in charge of our division – that’s where I met Rostov, by the way – yes, I was on the Eastern front and I’ll tell you we ought to be ashamed of the way our Ministry’s been silent about what happened on that front. Anyway, point is, I know, first-hand - Mad-Eye’s a brilliant man. Never a better man for catching dark wizards and fighting against _Das Grossere Wohl_. Trouble is, the war ended in 1945 and Mad-Eye doesn’t seem to have got that particular memo, see?”

Scrimgeour fell silent, apparently struggling with whatever it was he wanted to say next - a single muscle twitched in his jaw and he glanced off to the side jerkily, at odds with the usually phlegmatic persona he exuded at all times. Everyone joked about Mad-Eye’s paranoia - _constant vigilance_. It made it easy to pretend it was a personal tic, a genius’ eccentricity. Easy to forget all the other witches and wizards who had come home after the war with their own strange personal tics; bad habits refined and sharpened by war until they made life unbearable. Her own uncle had developed a tic for absolute and rigid punctuality and order until it drove Aunt Winifred bonkers and she left him for good. _They_ were unbearable, Mad-Eye was a genius man with odd habits and not – whatever it was Scrimgeour was trying to say, or not say because even the sound, the _thought_ of it was disrespectful. A sudden spike of nausea shot through Amelia and she clenched her fists inside her pockets.

“It made sense at the time,” he said, almost pleading now, if Scrimgeour could have ever pleaded with someone. “Place was riddled from top to bottom with Grindelwald’s people - so many of our people ended up at Grimmshel or plain dead because they didn’t have the right kind of pedigree and HQ didn’t like it, so HQ leaked it to the other side. Black’s own father - so many galleons - sent off from Britain to Grindelwald - for the greater good.”

“You’re saying he’s gone mad,” she said. “Old Mad-Eye’s gone stark, staring mad.”

“The war broke a lot of good people,” he said. “You see things - feel things - maybe your mate ends up ripped open from top to bottom with a curse you don’t have a bloody counterspell for and y’can’t hold him as he spills his guts out because he’s oozing blackness, pure dark magic - that kind of business goes to your head and it doesn’t get out -”

“You don’t think there’s a leak.”

“Not the one he seems to think there is,” he admitted. “Look, the Knights of Walpurgis - they’ve only shown interest in the squib agitators so far - what are they going to do with these peace talks? Drive the secessionists into walking out entirely so the Russians can go crying home to their muggle ministry and send out their bloody army? What’s that going to achieve? What’s a bloody war going to do for anyone except get them killed?”

He turned down the pathway to the terraced gardens and she followed.

“And then there’s Philby,” he said, as they passed under the row of winter-stripped rose bushes on the first level. “Lad’s name sounds bloody familiar, but I can’t place it for the life of me - something with the muggles, was it?”

“I don’t see what his name has to do with anything,” she said. “Unless you’re secretly a raving blood supremacist - oh bloody Merlin, are you?”

“Very funny Bones.”

“No, but seriously Rufus, you think he’s a different kind of problem altogether.”

“Might be, mightn’t be,” he said evasively. “I don’t think an East England sounds as good as East Germany.”

“That’s because the East’s all swampland, incest and rampant blood supremacy.”

“Shrewd Slytherin from fen.”

“Exactly.”

“I was in Slytherin,” Scrimgeour said, distantly. “Years ago, of course, long before your time. So was Mad-Eye, for that matter.”

She stopped short in her tracks. “You utter bastard.”

He grinned at her. “Come along Bones, keep up, we’ve still got the last level to comb - Merlin’s balls look at that - Rostov, you look like you’ve seen a Grim - sermon that bad?”

“A grim,” said Rostov, coming up to them. He was grim and white-faced, a tight look about his usually merry eyes. “Yes, I suppose - it might have been an Augurey she sent - oh hell, I’m not in the mood, Rufus.”

Amelia exchanged a puzzled glance with Scrimgeour.

“A letter came for me,” he said. “Let’s walk, keep walking - no don’t look up at the castle Bones, that bastard Dolohov’s almost certainly watching - and laugh if you can, I’m not in the mood, but it might help - no, you _must_ laugh -”

“Laugh,” she said faintly. “Is there a joke?”

“A joke,” said Rostov, with a harsh laugh. “A joke, yes it’s a joke. She sent me a letter here, Rufus - my god, don’t they teach them the first thing about the game? Dolohov watches all the time. He has an idea that if he watches hard enough, he’ll be able to stick a knife in my back and play second fiddle to Glinsky and his witch-watchers. She sent me a letter here - cigarette?”

He fumbled around with the box of cigarettes he kept in the inner pocket of his robes, not bothering to wait for an answer from either of them.

“Oh Rufus, it’s the best fucking joke of the century,” he continued. “Dresden rules, in the December of nineteen sixty-seven! Laugh, Zorya’s sake, why don’t you laugh?”

The colour drained from Scrimgeour’s face and, though anyone else might have missed it if they didn’t know where to look, his fingers twitched - _the Auror’s worst tell_ , Rostov had told her two weeks ago, _never look as though you want to reach for your wand_ \- before stilling.

“You’re being hysterical,” Scrimgeour said and he managed to sound far more composed than he looked. “Bloody Merlin Rostov, stop acting like a loon -”

But Rostov wasn’t listening. He had a cigarette jammed in his mouth and was trying to light it with his wand, growing more and more agitated as the flames he produced flickered and died within a moment of their appearance.

“I’m not hysterical,” he said - _one flame - hiss - two flame - hiss_ \- “Or paranoid, so don’t look at me like that. You know our most benevolent host has all our rooms rigged with recording spells? Of course you do,” _three flame - hiss - four flame_ \- “Dammit,” he flung his cigarette away from him, “And for an owl - a strange owl - to come to the castle, enter its wards - the whole place knows by now - Alexei Rostov received a letter from a stranger, the owl arrived at four AM this morning from the Bohemian-Moravian side of the mountain and the Ministries send all their messages by Transnational Floo alone, conclusion: Alexei Rostov is behaving suspiciously -”

Somehow, they managed to pull him on to the level below, where they would be out of sight of all except the highest floors of the castle, all of which were unoccupied – and where anyone wandering around those rooms would attract considerable suspicion, considering they were off bounds to the public.

“In Russia behaving suspiciously alone is grounds enough for arrest,” he said. “Receiving owls from strangers is enough to get you questioned - and a man in my position - KGB, imagine - the things they do to you -”

She slapped him hard across his face, hard enough that he stopped, shocked, mid-sentence.

“No one’s going to arrest you,” she said sharply. “So if you’ll just calm down and tell us what happened.”

He smiled sadly at both of them, then removed another cigarette and lit it without any trouble this time.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had a bad night. But I’m serious, Scrimgeour, dead serious. It has to be Dresden rules from now on out.”

Dresden rules - In 1951, halfway through the Auror training programme, they were shorthand for _there goes Mad-Eye again on one of his old rants_ \- the laughing stock of a younger generation who’d only lost relatives in the war, but had never known what it was like to be on the ground and in the thick of the fighting, let alone doing intelligence work for the Ministry while the Ministry was riddled with Grindelwald supporters. Someone made pamphlets of them once as a lark, a great romantic joke - _everyone’s an enemy_ , elaborate ruses to transfer packages from A to B and complex abstruse codices which required a cryptic crossword solver’s ability to read between the line preferably in Aramaic and Ancient Sanskrit all at once. Even Mad-Eye had picked up on their disdain for this archaic clandestine nonsense and had switched to his famous watchword - _constant vigilance_ , barked across their halls and sometimes, in their ears when they were least expecting it. _Constant vigilance_ \- counterpart: _you are never alone, do not look over your shoulder, but always be aware_. _Constant vigilance_ \- everything that can go wrong will and will go wrong at the worst possible moment.

“Fine,” said Scrimgeour. “Now tell us about the bloody letter.”

“They’ll bring it up in the session on Monday,” said Rostov. “I’m sure of it.”

She exchanged a worried glance with Scrimgeour as she tucked her hand in the crook of his arm.

“Just tell us, Alyosha,” she said.

He stared out at the forest below, lost in his thoughts, hands on the cold, stone balustrade, cigarette slowly burning forgotten, dangling from his mouth.

“What did it say?” she prodded. “The letter.”

He laughed bitterly. “My bloody nerves - you never expect to relive the past.”

He took another long and shaky draw on his cigarette and exhaled.

“Yes, Rostov,” said Scrimgeour, patient, relentless. “The letter.”

“Ah, dammit, Rufus,” said Rostov and then turned to face them. “You remember Max? Good old Max, sent us our last report on the secessionists and their friends in high places. His wife wrote to me last night. She says he hasn’t come home for four days.”

\--

On the other side of the castle, in a room which overlooked the German side of the mountain, Rodolphus Lestrange woke to the uncomfortable sensation of having missed Mass - easily handwaved, work was useful for something after all, there were always memos to compile and papers to sift through and arrange into some semblance of order - and of having seriously miscalculated everything concerning - _Philby_ \- who was currently humming tunelessly and looking like the cat that had got the cream as he fiddled with his cufflinks. He was also considerably more difficult to shove under the rug, away from Black, assuming Black wasn’t already aware, which was impossible because Black, well -

“Stop thinking so loudly,” said - _Philby_ \- carelessly buttoning up his shirt. “The Good Lord isn’t going to strike you down because you missed Mass _one_ Sunday.”

No, the Good Lord wouldn’t, but his mother was an entirely different matter - and there was Black too, who would want to know _why_ Rodolphus had spent Sunday morning in bed, when he could have been making good use of himself by trying his hand at a bit of soft diplomacy with the secretary of the Polish head of the DIMC. _Fellowship_ – and all that. Black was a perspicuous man who would see through any number of lies – and Rodolphus was wise enough to recognize his natural limitations; he was a terrible liar and would always be a terrible liar - and demand the truth, which was tricky in this case because - _Philby_ \- the damned idiot was a spanner in the works, unless Black _knew_ -

The damned idiot leaned over and patted his thigh patronizingly.

“ _Mon vieux_ , stop _worrying_ ,” he said. “We’re all beating for the same team. I’ll do what I have to do, you’ll do what you have to do and you’ll stop bloody worrying and sulking like an angry billy goat, hmmm?”

* * *

****

**v. Early 1968**

Years of careful work, of tapping the right people in the right place at the right time – of friends acquired through other friends and of networks built at an incremental pace – unspooled with a rapidity that left them in the fatalistic role of spectators to the destruction of their careful work. Max’s disappearance was only the first thread, the one which whoever it was – Rostov argued it could only be his people, Scrimgeour was cautious, insisted it could be anyone – had pulled on to begin the unravelling in the first place. He had disappeared without leaving a single trace, not even with the witch-watchers and not even with the KGB. In retrospect, this should have alarmed Scrimgeour and her in the same way it had alarmed Rostov on the morning the letter had arrived. But Rostov – intentionally or unintentionally, she would never know now – had quickly shaken off the panic and then later, the melancholia that had threatened to settle on him. In a few days he was back in high spirits and both she and Scrimgeour had taken his improvement in mood to mean the danger was past.

And for a while, it seemed as though the worst of the danger had passed. Fate or perhaps some other mischievous creature intervened, and that Monday the secessionists were up in arms not over English spies abroad, but a new English terrorist group who had sprung up out of nowhere, styling themselves the Knights of Walpurgis. The name was farcical and the whole thing would have been a joke if they hadn’t been efficient enough to have killed six or seven muggles and one muggleborn wizard (John Derry, 27, a witch-watcher temporarily employed in the Minister’s office) in an explosion. The Muggle Liaison Office put it about that this was the doing of a couple of rogue anarchists at large in London, but the Auror Office was hard pressed to match their piece of disinformation with their own kind. The Knights had very kindly made a point of sending a signed note (no names, Rufus sighed, but even terrorists could be intelligent on the rare occasion, damn them) to the _Prophet_ who published a special evening edition with great pomp and circumstance and not even the _Sol_ could have matched it for sheer scandalousness.

This was Grindelwald style nationalism all over again, shrieked the secessionists in Monday’s session, and Black’s counterpart in the Russian Ministry gravely agreed. This was symptomatic of the kind of separationist thinking so favoured by Britain and its western allies: it bred terrorists with a contempt for all human life except for the exclusive, elitist circles where membership was guaranteed solely on the basis of a mystical belief in the inherent superiority of ‘pure’ blood and not on scientific principle or fact. It bred reactionary fearmongerers – there was a good deal more in this vein and a lot of thinly veiled mudslinging: he would not name _names_ , but there were those present whose families had minted fortunes for themselves out of the witch hunts, selling their poorer brothers and sisters to corrupt members of the church and the state.

There was a good deal of grandstanding which followed this.

“Persecution mania!” cried Kuznetsov, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Why should we give in to this conservative desire for separatism? We are men, not apes. Progress – evolution – these cannot occur in isolation – we must mingle with our muggle brothers for it to happen! Why should we submit to the tyrannical rule of Zoucheist and Grindelwaldian governments? No, we will not be bullied –“

Typical bosh, really. Gambol was fond of making speeches like this in the Wizengamot, though Gambol admittedly had a lot more flair and a good deal more wit than Kuznetsov, bless his earnest heart, had.

Evidently this realization had struck Kuznetsov too, because he then moved on from textbookish recitations of propaganda into personal insults: did they think _they_ didn’t know that their noble host had once made a treaty with Grindelwald for protection as a reward for the speedy handing over of Bavaria? Did they think they didn’t know the German, French and British Ministries were overrun by Grindelwald supporters and blood supremacists of the worst order?

“Never,” he said, “will we allow ourselves to be ruled by the corrupt and venal interests of war criminals, terrorists and collaborators for we are witches and wizards of the twenty-first century and we believe in the rule of law and the equality of all thinking and speaking beings.”

In the midst of all the outrage that followed this incendiary speech, no one had the heart to point out that Nikita Kuznetsov’s pet Oprichnik - as they called the service - was a Glinsky and that the Glinskys were one of Russia’s oldest pureblood families. It was, as Rostov put it, too cruel, like taking sweets from a child, to take the man’s greatest political triumph so far from him when he was clearly so keen on making a name for himself, especially not by doing something as cruel as pointing out the truth. And besides, he added with generous fairmindedness, it was quite possible that Dmitri Andreyevich Glinsky was a revolutionary, even if he kept that fact extremely well hidden from everyone around him.

“It pays to have secrets in his profession, after all,” he said, with only the faintest hint of malice about him.

Whatever it was, Max Novak’s disappearance remained unremarked upon and Amelia and Scrimgeour both breathed easy, given respite from the hot seat, however momentary it was. And it _was_ fleetingly ephemeral. The week which followed was a stalemate filled with incessant demands for apologies and one lengthy speech by the Graf which was neither an apology nor an attempt to excuse himself from his sordid past but included vague yet biting allusions to the misdoings of his fellow bureaucrats and aristocrats – if he was tainted, why then so was the whole Ministry and didn’t they know of such-and-such who had not only signed a treaty with Grindelwald but allowed him full use of his castle? Or perhaps this one, who had fought in Grindelwald’s Cadmus Guard and now piously pretended he had always been part of the pacifist movement? – that raised hackles and further derailed the talks into the listing of the litany of sins each member present had committed at some point or the other. And while this was going on, Scrimgeour was sent another memo in code (passed through the appropriate channels this time, until it looked quite harmless) from Jan in Prague, informing them the waters were too hot and he’d rather not get burnt, thanks very much. The esteemed ambassadors to the International Confederation of Wizards bickered back and forth and in the meanwhile, Scrimgeour, with his hands tied behind his back thanks to their uncomfortable proximity to the very people they were spying on, sent out letter after letter, spending whole days out at a go and returning in the wee hours of the morning, in a vain attempt to discover the reason for this sudden evaporation of two of their most prized friends.

“Old mates,” he told her grimly. “We fought side by side, dammit. It isn’t Quidditch.”

Scrimgeour, it seemed, had fought on more fronts than one man could have conceivably managed on his own. She wisely let him have the lie. It paid, after all, to have secrets in his profession - and now she was acquiring some of her own.

Then, that following Monday: Orion Black poured oil upon the waters and set fire to them. Kuznetsov had called him a collaborator, he called Kuznetsov a naive child. He listed all the countries guilty of having sided with Grindelwald at some point or the other during the war and then went on about bloody political necessity.

“It is a cruel master,” said Black. “It makes bedfellows of all kinds of enemies. Ideological purity is a child’s fantasy. One would expect better from a notable politician and um, representative to the ICW, but then of course, one must admire my esteemed colleague’s idealism – so rare in our profession – however impractical it may be.”

You had to give the man points for audacity.

Black then went on and on for ages, hammering the bloody point home. Compromise was a necessary part of political life. It was the life-blood behind the myriad exceptions to the Berlin Convention. They could have been stubborn if they’d wanted, and demanded all 170 countries adhere to its clauses concerning wizarding rights and the new clauses of the Statute of Secrecy, but they’d _compromised_ – she counted him use the word nearly twenty times over the course of this section – and let them go. He even made it sound virtuous, as though they’d asked the people what they thought about it ( _through democratic process_ , were his exact words), when all they’d done was draft up a treaty in the middle of the night and then happily signed away their responsibilities to the people living on the ground – because it was too inconvenient, or whatever the fuck their sorry excuse for it was.

Black didn’t stop there. He went on to list their many sins:  A curfew set for seven PM in Berlin, nine PM in all the major enclaves across these sixteen countries. A punitive penal code which celebrated censorship, surveillance and the restriction of personal freedom – to pick an example at random, the penalty for Apparating outside of designated and Ministry-surveilled Apparation zones was three months in a Ministry owned prison for a first time offender, while a repeat offence warranted visits by members of the muggles’ witch-watchers. The growing list of witches and wizards who had disappeared without a trace, of family members who then disappeared in the course of their inquiries into the disappearance of their loved ones. More demands from their muggles for the forcible conscription of witches and wizards into public service, too often on pain of imprisonment or worse. British correspondents followed and harassed for daring to document all of these ills and probably much worse for their local newsmen. The constant surveillance of their embassies by both muggles and Russians, a complete and utter violation of the privacy and immunity of diplomats.

If there was a clause to the Rights Of The Wizards he could pin on them, he pinned it on them. It was all cleverly done and it made her _sick_.

“If we are not vigilant,” he said, “they will soon restrict the right of wizards and witches to bear wands for the sake of the ‘public good’ and they will claim this is ‘freedom’. _Real_ freedom, if you will. If this is their understanding of the word, Britain will not stand for it for we believe in the inalienable right of each witch and wizard to bear wands at all time and _sans_ restriction and we will protect those who stand in danger of losing this right to an idealized notion of progress. Even the tyrant Grindelwald understood that government is for the good of the people, however narrow-minded his definition of personhood might have been. One gets the impression our colleague here wants to debate the necessity of _Les Droits des Sorciers_. The British people do not. We stand for freedom, the rights of all witches and wizards and the peaceful coexistence of muggle and magical society.

“We will not be bullied into submission,” he continued. “And we will not allow the German people to be bullied into making a choice they did not ask for by the corrupt and the power-hungry, by those who think holding wands to the heads of their people is an acceptable form of government. A mistake was made in 1951; we will not allow it to be repeated. The values of this body - of our British values - are at stake and we are prepared to fight for them, if the democratic process and the will of the people are not adhered to.”

He was a clever devil. The way he put it, his case was unassailable unless you’d been there or you had recordings of the proceedings. No, not of the proceedings – those would have been all completely above board. Untouchable. You had to be able to sneak into their clubs and hear the backchat, the backroom dealings: the stuff outside the meeting minutes: if you wanted to know the whole truth. But those were locked doors and you had to be able to boast about your ancestors who’d fought at Agincourt (extra points for Hastings) if you wanted those doors to unlock for you. What did it matter anyway? In the end, the poor east Germans were the ones being bandied back and forth like a hot potato people only wanted to hold on to when it suited them.

More jingoistic mudslinging: none of _them_ were complicit in the disappearance of thousands of witches and wizards, sent to what the muggles called _gulags_ out far east and while certainly, some of them had made mistakes, none of them could be accused of being _hypocrites_ where their political beliefs were concerned - forgive him but surely the apparatus of a secret police were tools worthy of the most extremist Zoucheist plot ––

At which point, Amelia Bones discreetly rose and left the hall where the members of the ICW were gathered, leaving the junior Auror, Boot, to deal with the impending riot.

“Makes you think of school,” said Shweta Rao, one of the Aurors from the Indian contingent. “Friends, not friends, I won’t play unless you play _my_ way - this came for you, by the way, you missed your cryptographer by a few minutes. Poor boy looked like he was going to cry.”

There were two notes. One from Moody, this time a garbled and convoluted message about the ten muggle deaths being misdirection and John Derry having known something he would have told Moody, except alas, for the mole. The mole, the mole, the goddamn mole. Her reply was to the point, bordering on rude. _Dear Moody, we’re in the middle of a crisis of our own and London is a long fucking way away_. Or something like that; it was the gist of it anyway. She pushed it to the corner of her mind because it was unimportant, irrelevant and too far away to really fucking matter when she had the second note on her hand. Because while Orion Black made thinly veiled insinuations about Kuznetsov being as bad as Grindelwald if not worse, the Belarusian Auror division had sent a message to one of their missing agents’ family informing them that they were sorry to be the bearers of such bad news, but it appeared that Nikolai Sokolov had committed suicide by leaping into the Berezina river from the train en route from Novgorod to Berlin.

Once you lined them up in a row the pattern was too obvious to miss. The last three intelligence reports were from each of them: Max Novak on border activity along the south side of the line, Jan on the embassy in Prague, Nikolai Sokolov on the movement of the leviathan machine that was the Russian Auror division. Jan’s desertion bore all the signs of an honourable man who’d been sweated either by some very powerful or very dangerous people, in all likelihood, both. They would never know the story behind Sokolov’s death, whether someone had followed him onto the train and whether someone had sat down and spoken to him on the long ride from Novgorod to Berlin; what was said, what was shown to him, what was left unsaid and unshown, whether Sokolov had thrown himself from the train, or worse, was pushed or perhaps even worse, already been dead when he fell in. Max Novak was an enigma. Until a body, or Max, alive against the odds, turned up, there was nothing they could do except make conjectures. The mole and his friend were professionals but not professional enough. The pattern formed by these two disappearances and a formal retreat told her several things about their mole: they were uninitiated, desperate and this was quickly becoming her pet theory: they were close to home, not London, but right here in this castle.

Uncomfortably, Black’s question from a little more than a month ago slid through her mind along with his bland reply to Scrimgeour’s staunch defence of Alexei Rostov. _You know best, of course_. Bland enough it deliberately gave the statement the lie. There was no earthly reason for either Black or Lestrange to be the leak. They were of the same breed of Englishman as Travers was: suspicious of anything that reeked of the foreign, full of their own Englishness, a strain of nauseating patriotism, the kind who would unironically declaim the words of Blake’s Jerusalem and get misty-eyed in the process – assuming they would have stooped to quoting squibs, especially ones reappropriated muggles. They were the kind of patriot, who among other things, delighted in mocking the strange and alien look of every other language, deliberately twisted words and names to reinforce their foreignness. Not one of the boys. It was quite likely Black believed every single word of his earlier speech, which made him an implausible candidate for the leak. Certainly, Lestrange was dull enough to have accidentally let slip something which seemed harmless, yet would hold significant meaning for someone in the know – but Lestrange was monosyllabic at all times, except in the company of Black (and Philby, but that was another matter entirely, one she had no time for _yet_ ). Black, on the other hand, was not dull and was therefore unlikely, even if he _did_ insist on having the _real_ names of their circle, rather than relying purely on Scrimgeour as a go-between.

This left Rostov.

She folded away her papers and consigned them to the portable Ministry-issued and Gringotts-vetted safe in one of the Blue Suite’s offshoot rooms. If this was a problem and not the stealthy work of Philby and Lestrange, united for some unknown purpose (there was a coincidence if there ever was one to be found, all of these disappearances had begun only after Philby’s arrival) – here her mind swam at the thought of Lestrange, enticed into an illicit affair and betraying his country out of love, until the thought of Lestrange in the role of star-crossed and conflicted lover threatened to send her into hysterics – then it could be dealt with later, preferably after consulting with Scrimgeour. It was Scrimgeour’s problem, after all. Hers was the talks and Black’s political grandstanding. The Minister would never forgive her if he was armtwisted on her watch. He would sigh and turn to look out of the false windows in his office, study the false image of London charmed on to it and then give her a grave and disappointed look, the one which made people feel small and monstrous at the same time. The Minister was free to try his naive optimism on Black if he imagined Black could be stopped by anything as plebeian as outside forces.

Philby was standing by the table, gazing out of the window and drumming his fingers on the desk in a rhythmless pattern when she returned. He turned, smiling apologetically - and for some reason this raised her hackles far more than if he’d been surprised, or guilty, at having been found standing so close to the papers she’d left outside on the table.

“Interesting speech of his,” he said conversationally.

(“You’re too kind,” Travers had once shouted peevishly at her, while they’d been working on the Fen Murders case two years ago. “You can’t be nice to these people, they only understand one language!”

She had, of course, cracked the case partially open before Travers had pulled her off it. The guilty wizard confessed his role as accomplice tearfully to her over a cup of tea – _he didn’t say anything about murder, it was all just about teaching them wot it’s like to be one of us_. A little kindness could go a long, long way.)

“You could call it that,” she replied. “I thought it was a bit much, personally.”

“He did lay it on a bit thick with the British values,” Philby agreed. “I didn’t care much for the comparison he made either.”

She began sorting through the papers, one pile for shredding and one for filing. “Grindelwald and Kuznetsov?”

“ _I_ thought he meant the secessionists and Grindelwald.”

“I suppose it can’t be helped,” she said. “Grandstanding is an unfortunate hazard of his profession. How’s the work coming along?”

“Hmmm? Oh, the – yes – only one last round of warding spells to crack,” he said. “You don’t think he meant what he said?”

“Why should he?” She flicked her wand and the pile for filing straightened itself out. “I can’t imagine anyone his age would want to live through another war.”

“You’d be surprised,” Philby murmured, more to himself than to her.

“You’re not _seriously_ accusing Black -”

“Oh, Merlin, no.” Philby laughed. “I was just thinking out loud. Must be horrid being a German, caught between the fires of the Hebridean Black on the one side and the Siberian Blizzardback on the other.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I imagine living in Berlin on the other side, with the Ministry constantly reporting on your movements to the muggles must be far worse than two countries waving their wands angrily at each other.”

Again, Philby muttered underneath his breath in a way that sounded as though he was rehearsing a part, as though he had mapped this conversation out beforehand: “But _are_ they just wand-waving?”

Nikolai Sokolov had been extremely informative on the subject. In code, in letters that had a complex delivery system which restricted the number of people who could get their hands on them to only the select few and Philby was distinctly _not_ the select few.

Amelia deliberately waved her wand and waited for the papers to start shredding themselves.

“Are you coming for the dinner?” she asked him, keeping her voice as steady as she could.

“Dinner?” he said. _Yes_ , she thought _, definitely rehearsed_. “Oh yes, the Countess - for British values and all that.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re forgetting the best behaviour part.”

“I’m less worried about that than I am about the ‘and entertainment’ part of it,” he confessed. “I hate dancing. But look - you don’t think there’s the chance this could turn into a proper war, d’you?”

Amelia fiddled with the strings on the file in front of her, Scrimgeour’s warning to be careful what she said to whom running through her mind.

“Only if the Minister signed off on it,” she said. “And the Minister is a committed pacifist.”

“He could always change his mind.”

She snorted as she scooped the files up and held them to her. “Not bloody likely, unless - but oh it doesn’t matter, it’s bloody unlikely - now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

His fingers, restlessly tapping against the wood, faltered for the barest split-half of a second, so short she was sure she had imagined it into existence, when she’d deliberately bitten that sentence off halfway, because it resumed again at precisely the same speed and cadence as before.

And again, that smile which made the back of her neck tingle. Something about the way it failed to reach his eyes: too alert and watchful for his easy and open smile.

“You’re right,” he said. “I should get back to cracking those wards. I’ll see you later, shall I? Oh by the way – would you mind terribly if I removed our would-be assassin’s little present to my room while I have a crack at it? It’s just, I wake up with the most absurd ideas and I want to try them out, but then I have to wait for the morning and by then I’ve completely forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place – and I wouldn’t want to do anything without your knowing first.”

“You’d best ask the investigating Auror,” she said. “If he’s all right with it, I don’t see why you can’t move it to your room, though won’t it be bad for you – healthwise – what with the – dark magic and all that?”

“Oh no, I’m used to it,” he said. “Nothing on the stuff floating around in Babylon – drives you barmy if you aren’t trained right – anyway, thanks terribly. I’ll tell him you cleared it. See you in the evening, then!”

“Formal robes,” she reminded him. “Not shagpile.”

“Not shagpile,” he echoed with another broad grin.

She added Philby to the growing list of potential problems they had on their hands.

\--

That evening, fate, who was unkind and a bastard, failed to intervene on her behalf. She was admiring the ballroom’s elaborate decor – _you must forgive us, this is all very last minute and I’m afraid it’s all messy_ , the Countess had said, as she led them into the room which had very clearly been cleaned and decorated expressly for that night – when Alyosha sidled up to her before she could make her escape, make some excuses – anything, to not have to worry about Black’s bland but dangerous insinuations, anything that would keep her from giving the game away.

“You look radiant tonight,” he said. “Will you do me the honour of dancing this waltz with me?”

“No,” she said, then hurriedly: “Yes - no, I can’t dance.”

“I’m going to Moscow tomorrow,” he continued lightly. “There’s urgent business which needs my attention.”

“Moscow?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Moscow. I’d rather not go, but one must follow where duty calls.”

For a long moment, they stood in silence, all possible replies faltering on her tongue - _why Moscow, why now, what duty, I’m sorry, I can’t dance, I hate dancing, mother used to force me to go for lessons, duty is a cruel mistress_ \- as he studied the crowd. And then just as suddenly he turned back to her with a bright smile, just as false as the ones Philby wore.

“So you see, I’d like to dance with you before I go,” he said. “Come now, you won’t deny me this small pleasure, will you?”

“I’m not very good at it,” she said.

“Not for the act itself,” he murmured, “but for the pleasure of your company.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you when I stamp on your feet,” she told him, placing her hand in his.

“You could never hurt me,” he said gallantly. “Only break my heart.”

She rolled her eyes as he placed his hand on her waist. “Do you say such ridiculous things to all the witches you meet?”

“Would you believe me if I said it was only you?”

“I’d laugh if you said it was only me,” she said with candour.

He grinned. “Then I won’t say it. Ah - can you believe it? I haven’t waltzed since Dresden - such a dreary life I lead – you know Dolohov? Well-built, dark hair, long face, looks like he’s never been out in the sun –”

“He’s standing next to the head of your DIMC,” she said, startled by this sudden change of topic. “What about him? Is something wrong?”

“Is he watching us? No, don’t stare – carefully now – yes –”

“He isn’t,” she said. “Alexei – what’s –”

“No,” he said, shushing her. “Nothing – nothing’s wrong, _ma chere_. Just me. He stares so much, it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes it makes me think – but then I say to myself, what makes me any different from old Mad-Eye? Can’t the man stare at whoever he wants?”

“Y-yes, I suppose so?” she replied, mystified.

He swept her around in a circle. “Has Philby finished cracking the wards on that little gift the assassins left you?”

She blinked. “Philby?” she repeated.

“That _is_ the name of the boy your Ministry sent, isn’t it?”

“Yes – but –”

“No, don’t look confused, it doesn’t become you,” said Alyosha, all business despite his fond grin. “Smile – something softer, please. Dresden Rules, remember?”

She forced herself to look straight into his eyes and smile.

“Better,” he said. “Now, Philby – if you please?”

“He’s still working on it,” she said. “He’s been asking questions -”

“Of course he’s asking questions,” he said. “About war?”

“Y - es - how did you know?”

“A guess,” he said lightly.

They swept down the floor – away from Dolohov and Glinsky, she noted.

“Now,” said Alyosha, putting his mouth to her ear. “No, please don’t struggle – remember what I said, smile or blush, anything – remember, Alexei Anatolievich Rostov is an incorrigible flirt. Good, now listen carefully and memorize what I tell you, all the details – it is vital that you do this, if you want to stop this disaster from happening. Can you do this for me?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Tell me.”

“Good girl,” he said. “Now – on the fifth of December, the Aurors Denisov and Skuratov sent a package to Moscow from a special muggle-wizard collaborative settlement in central Siberia. This package weighed no more than fifty kilos and was carried, in a trunk, by none other than our friend Glinsky’s closest lackey, Vassily Basmanov to the witch-watcher directorate in Moscow. Once things pass into the Ignarium it is impossible to trace their whereabouts and so one may only conjecture where it might be right now. What is almost certain is that this package will no longer be found inside our borders. Vassily travelled to Vladivostok immediately after delivering this package, and Glinsky, of course, is with us here. Five days ago, a source of mine in the muggle Ministry informed me that a report had been filed concerning a missing convoy from Krasnoyarsk-45 which I believe, was carrying a certain amount of enriched Uranium to one of our many nuclear bases. You follow me?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She smiled, for the sake of Dolohov and Glinsky and their watchful eyes more than anything, her heart hammering painfully against her ribs.

“Excellent,” he murmured. “You’re right to be afraid. Two nights ago, I received a letter from a good – friend – of mine, addressed from Krasnoyarsk-53, confirming that this package almost certainly contains the fruits of several years of hard work on the part of some of our smartest muggles and wizards, concerning the creation of a nuclear device – powerful enough to destroy whole cities, compact enough to be concealed in oh – a briefcase, or a bag with an undetectable Extension Charm placed on it, for example. I think it is safe to say that it is safely in the hands of its intended and illegal recipients.”

She moved her hand up his shoulder to his neck. “What are you saying?” she whispered.

“Exactly what you think I’m saying: someone has smuggled a nuclearized bomb out of our country, very likely into the hands of the secessionists.”

“A slap in the face of western European Zoucheism,” she said.

“The greatest political triumph of our time. I would have found the bomb itself, but alas duty callls,” he said lightly, leaning back to look at her. “Wonderful. No one would guess I had done anything except whisper filthy vulgarities in your ear, looking at you.”

“Why tell me?” she asked him.

He smiled, an inexpressibly sad expression. “You’re very kind – innocent – you’re not like the rest of us at all – no, no that’s wrong – you’re far above us.”

This was punctuated with a kiss to her knuckles that discomfited her, which later she would say felt like a farewell even though at the time all it did was make her worry he would be heartbroken if he found out she simply didn’t swing his way.

“Alyosha,” she said, “you’re a very nice person, but I’m not – I don’t –”

“Oh no, I know,” he said. “Amelia Bones, age thirty-five, girlfriend called Marlene McKinnon so don’t try all your idiotic tricks on her, Rostov.”

“ _You_ –”

“So am I, by the way,” he added. “Not – well. Playing for the same team.”

“Your friend,” she said, amused.

“Yes. The friend. He spends most of his time in Norilsk doing penance for a crime he committed in his youth - very religious, you wouldn’t think that looking at me, would you?” he laughed. Then: “I think I shall see him very soon - you will take care of yourself, won’t you?”

“Merlin’s balls, don’t be such a fatalist,” she said. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said wryly. “Not even the great Madame Vlabatsky could say what the future holds - so we’ll only say _au revoir_ and not goodbye, hmm?”

That night, Alexei Rostov left for Moscow. He crossed the border into Bohemia-Moravia early that morning, wrote Max Novak’s wife, where he was met with an escort dressed in the jet black robes of the Russian witch-watcher division. The two were then spotted in Prague by the _Prophet’s_ man in town, where they reportedly escorted him into the Embassy - _quite sure it was an escort, stands to reason, why else should they stand so close to him?_ _Daylight grab job, if you ask me_. The last information they received about his whereabouts was from one of the attendants in the magical half of the Maharysk station, where he was seen boarding the long train, not to Moscow, but to Khlynov. From there, the trail went cold and he disappeared without a trace.

\--

Memo from the Office of the Minister For Magic, London, to the Embassy for Britain, Munich, redir. Office for the Representative for European Affairs to the ICW, Schloss Rabenstein.  
**Status:** Confidential, High Priority.  
**Dispatched:** 10:00 PM GMT, 24 Jan 1968  
**Via:** LON-MUC Tr.Ntl Floo  
**Arrived:** 11:15 PM CET, 24 Jan 1968  
**Received by:** G. Montefior at 11:40 PM CET

BONES - Do not care if Kuznetsov claims we’re harboring terrorists/are proxy informants to the MACUSA/part of a western European plot to undermine sovereignty. War strictly out of the question. Do not let Black back us into stance we cannot afford to maintain.  
\- N. Leach

Memo from the Office for the Representative for European Affairs to the ICW, Schloss Rabenstein to the Embassy for Britain, Munich redir. Office of the Minister For Magic, London.  
**Status:** Confidential, High Priority.  
**Dispatched:** 1:00 AM CET, 24 Jan 1968  
**Via:** MUC-LON Tr.Ntl Floo  
**Arrived:** 12:15 AM GMT, 24 Jan 1968  
**Received by:** F. Urquhart at 12:20 AM GMT

With all due respect Minister, Kuznetsov is not merely _insinuating_ our involvement with terrorists, but has outright accused us of an elaborate plot to steal Russian artillery both on behalf of our muggles and in order to stage an attack on the secessionists in Berlin. He has accused us, in short, of violating the Budapest Treaty concerning the sovereignty of nations and the ethical limits of espionage & has hinted that he possesses damning evidence to this effect. The gravity of the accusations cannot be ignored.

I am as much against war as you are, but we have been forced into a situation in which diplomacy can no longer be used. The Berlin consulate’s reports must have reached you by now, so I will not repeat all the disturbing reports we have received concerning the movement of Auror squads on the secessionists’ side of the wall. I recommend, and I am sure Oswald Montmorency would agree with me, the hard line and if pushed further, a declaration of war on behalf of our allies in Germany.

\- O. Black

\--

It snowed all night on the twenty-fourth of January, all of the twenty-fifth and on the twenty-sixth, it turned into a blizzard. The castle was filled with long shadows and an ugly brooding air as Aurors, diplomats and their contingents hurried across its halls in clustered twos and threes. Where once an air of lazy camaraderie laced with friendly rivalry reigned between the various nations present, now reigned an atmosphere of suspicion bordering on hostility. The secessionists and their supporters refused to dine along with the west Europeans. Nikita Kuznetsov and Stauber had their dinners prepared in their suites. The non-aligned nations received all kinds of bribes, pleas and dinner invitations - and stayed firmly out of it, perhaps frightened at the turn events had taken. The countess took to her room with the vapours. She was ill, dangerously ill, said the count, frantically flapping his hands at anyone who asked about her. The peevish insinuation of his statement was obvious: _you’ve made her ill, you’ve all made her ill, every last one of you!_ He was being investigated by the German DMLE for his alleged ties to Grindelwald.

In their impromptu office in the Blue Suite, Black, Scrimgeour and Bones held council while Lestrange handed out biscuits and tea.

“I must say this puts me in a very difficult position,” said Black. “Are you absolutely certain about Rostov?”

“Unless Blythely’s been bought out by their Ministry and you’d think _The Wixenomist_ would get it right this time round after the last fiasco with Inkpin,” Scrimgeour replied. “The train to Khlynov passes near Minsk and none of our friends in Minsk saw them change trains. If they changed to a Moscow train, that would have been the best place for it. Blythely didn’t see him at Moscow, so it stands to reason he must have gone on.”

“You realize the implications of what you’re saying.”

“I do, yes. It’s unfortunate, but if we’re to get to the bottom of this -”

“The bottom of this,” Black cut him off. “Lestrange, pass the tea here, there’s a good lad – yes that’s precisely the trouble isn’t it? The bottom – what _will_ we find if we dig deep enough? Would it be better to save ourselves the trouble and the time and let well alone? _Is_ there a bottom to be found?”

“It can’t be plots all the way down.”

“Can’t it?” said Black. “These eastern types can be lethal. All that oriental blood – ah yes, thank you – and the cream, dear boy – no, it’s all hysterics and cunning conspiracies all the way down with these fellows.”

Scrimgeour rolled his eyes at her as Black preoccupied himself with his tea.

“And here I thought conspiracy was the collective noun for purebloods,” he murmured to her, _sotto voce_.

She snorted and hastily turned it into a sneeze, hiding behind her handkerchief as Black looked up inquiringly at them.

“ _Don’t_ ,” she hissed at him through her handkerchief.

“What’s the girl’s interest in the matter?” Black asked Scrimgeour. “Rather odd, isn’t it - waiting a full month after your husband’s disappeared to find him? It does make one wonder about her dedication to the man.”

“It is strange,” Scrimgeour admitted. “But it’s the best chance we’ve got if we want to know whether Kuznetsov has another wand up his sleeve he’s waiting to use on us.”

“Oh quite, dear boy,” said Black. “But _I_ am worried we might be walking head first into a trap. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s used a threat like this to blackmail innocents into trapping their enemies. What do you think, Miss Bones - or are you still indisposed?”

She hurriedly tucked her handkerchief into her pocket. “With all due respect Mr Black, it seems highly unlikely. If I was a ghost for the other side, I wouldn’t want to use this as a trap simply _because_ it’s so suspicious. Anyone I wanted to get my hands on would come in eyes skinned for trouble. And even if it is a trap, there’s a difference between walking into it with your eyes open and walking into it without having the faintest hint of suspicion you’re walking into one. It’s the one shot we have at getting answers - our usual networks have been ruthlessly severed, we can’t expect the _Prophet_ and _The_ _Wixenomist_ to stick their necks out any further, Kuznetsov’s breathing down our necks with the promise of damning evidence he refuses to show anyone, the secessionists and their supporting countries all seem to be lining their borders with troops and we can’t afford proactive engagement - this is as good a chance as any we’re going to get and it’s a great deal better than sitting around and twiddling our thumbs in this blizzard.”

“A succinct summary,” Black said blandly. “Unfortunately, we were debating the girl’s trustworthiness.”

“Don’t these concerns make her trustworthiness irrelevant?” she said as Scrimgeour said: “Don’t see how it matters.”

Black set his cup of tea down.

“You’re very determined,” he told Scrimgeour.

“If it stops a war,” she said. “Why shouldn’t he be?”

“And you agree, Lestrange?”

The boy hesitated before answering. “I think it’s for the best, sir. Catch them with their wands holstered and all that.”

“You understand the position this puts me in politically,” said Black. “I can’t officially condone any action which violates the Budapest Treaty - but Merlin knows we must act or else run the risk of another long and bloody conflict.”

He sighed.

“Go, go if you must go,” he said irritably. “Go.”

\--

_Scrimgeour,_

_Suspect mole is not for the secessionists, but the Walpurgises & Derry had misfortune to find out. Minister in grave danger from Walpurgis plot. _

_Yours,  
Alastor Moody_

\--

In the early hours of the twenty-seventh of January, Rufus Scrimgeour descended the other side of the Adlerhorst and crossed over the border into Bohemia-Moravia.

Downstairs, in his room on one of the lower floors overlooking the eastern side of the mountain, Tony Philby lowered his pair of omniculars, an expression of grim satisfaction on his face. He slipped them into their leather pouch and tossed them carelessly on to his bed. Then, he sat down and changed his heavy boots for a pair of lighter rubber plimsolls, pulled on a plain black overcoat, leaned over his bed and waved his wand.

A small, oblong chest which had a long crack running down the center of its lid slid out from underneath his bed. With another wave of his wand and a mumbled _egritudo augurium_ several thin white and green strands of light floating wispily around the chest and entwined around one another became visible to the naked eye. He grinned at this. It was amazing how much one could count on the deficiencies of a government-funded school education to get away with the most thinly veiled covers. He waved his wand again and muttered an ancient Ligurian version of the more common Latin _finite incantatem_ \- and watched in delight as the thin strands of light turned misty and then faded away, leaving just the box behind. As deliciously simple as that, if you knew how and where to look.

“Alohomora,” he whispered.

The locks on the chest clicked open and Philby allowed himself a smile at his triumph before opening the lid and carefully examining its contents. Satisfied with his find, he shut the box and locked it, then replaced the ward charms and slid it back underneath his bed.

He then proceeded methodically. First he accio’d a foot-long piece of parchment from his suitcase and tore it in half. On the top half he scribbled a note, charmed it invisible and then folded it in half and pocketed it. He did the same for the second half, but before he folded it away he took the omniculars and carefully prised them open. From inside it, he removed a small black rectangle. This he placed into the centre of the second note and with an elaborate series of folds, contrived to turn it into an impromptu envelope. He sealed it shut using an old Illyrian sticking spell and pocketed it.

Then he slipped out of his room and made his way in the dark: down one flight of stairs and then up two, left down the corridor to the fourth door on the right. He slid both the envelope and the note underneath the door and went straight back to his room, stopping only to enjoy the view of the courtyard posed by the giant arched windows on the second floor landing. Once back in his room he locked his door, removed his plimsolls and his coat, climbed into bed and settled in for the long wait.

\--

It snowed for as long as it took him to cross the border and the forest to find the barn in the middle of nowhere. It stood out like a sore thumb: one lonely square, nearly black, in the bleak white landscape. Too visible, too ostentatious. A stray Auror, looking in the right place at the right time would wonder why and who would build a barn in the middle of nowhere, when the nearest farm was nearly three miles away. But there were no stray Aurors who visited this part of the world, because the kind of wizards Aurors wanted to catch stuck to the poky and unnamed alleys of towns, brimming with life in its most seedy and jaded forms. Anyone with enough brains could walk into one of those tiny streets, get jostled about and disappear if they were inclined to. Those were the rules. And every now and then, it paid to break those rules to run straight into the jaws of the dragon with your wand held high.

In the doorway stood one lone figure, dark red robes billowing around it with the wind and the snow.

_Leo, I know what my husband did for you. I don’t believe he would have left me, or died so easily. If you were ever his friend, find him for me. Come to me, help me, I’ll tell you everything, I have secrets even you don’t know, even you master spymaster. Come to me and I’ll help you any way I can, if you’ll find my husband for me._

_Ana Novak_ , he thought grimly. She was cradling a rifle in her arms.

“Mrs Novak,” he said.

She stared at him. A hard-faced and stony-eyed stare he’d seen too many times, almost always when he’d been the bearer of bad news. For all he knew, this was a trap, but not the one they’d suspected. All she had to do was raise that ancient rifle and blow a hole in him and that would be that. They’d never even guess.

“What was his real name?” she said, still hard-faced. “Where did you first meet him?”

“His real name was Tomáš Železný,” he replied. “We met on the tenth of December in 1941 at the Leaky Cauldron in London, the night after he came to England determined to sign up as a pilot in our muggles’ RAF.”

“You signed him up for this instead,” she said.

“He wanted to fight,” he said. “I showed him how he could.”

“Bloody English,” she swore. “I have something to show you.”

He followed her into the barn. Even with the snow and the dreary beginnings of dawn behind them, its insides were doused with darkness.

“He’s here,” she said into the darkness. “You can come out now, it’s him.”

There was the sound of shuffling and then boots thumping overhead and floorboards creaking, the sound of someone coming closer and lower down until finally, two men came into view.

“Bloody Merlin,” he breathed.

“Not exactly,” said Tomáš Železný alias Max Novak, as he leaned heavily on his friend. “But close enough.”

“ _You_ ,” he hissed at Jan. “You said -”

“It’s not important,” said Jan, helping Max into a sitting position on a bale of straw. “We’ll tell you the story later once we’re on our way, including how Max here managed to break his leg so badly we can’t fix it for him. Tell him what you found Max.”

“You make it sound as though I wanted it to happen,” Max grumbled. “Leo, the kneazle’s among the fwoopers and make no mistake. I was going to tell you when they came from me. Those Aurors along the border? They weren’t sent there by our Ministry. Or rather they were, but apparently if you’re lucky enough to find a top dog in the Office and ply him with enough drinks, he’ll tell you all about how the Russian Ministry’s been carefully handing out the orders to our Auror corps. I was lucky enough to catch not only a top dog, but one of the rare Russians wandering around in mufti. Got drunk as a fucking peasant on May day and started boasting about what all the things he knew. Skuratov, his name was, I think. Said he knew things that would make my hair stand on end. Try me, I said. I was in a fucking war, you know? You can’t fucking scare me anymore. Ohohoho, he says and leans in bloody close – fucker has breath like a pigsty. We’ll get rid of all those fuckers from the west, telling us how to run our country and preaching about freedom and they’ll never know who did it. Take them down from inside, that’s how we’ll do it. How, I ask him. How, he shouts and slams the table. And the he whispers: we’re giving the secessionists a present, see? - ahhhh -”

He paused, face contorted with pain as he clutched his leg. Ana Novak knelt beside him and prised his hands free, then applied a cold compress to the area.

“What present?” Scrimgeour asked him. “Did he tell you?”

Max hissed in pain and then said through gritted teeth: “Oh he told me. Said it in a nasty voice too, like he thought it was a grand joke: from Russia with love, a bomb for their enemies.”

\--

Rodolphus Lestrange slipped out onto the terrace by the dining room for a smoke early that morning, collar of his thick woollen cloak pulled up to his ears to fend against the cold. The terrace was ordinarily a popular place for the younger members of the various contingents to gather and smoke over copious cups of coffee or glühwein, but what with – everything, really, including the early hour – the place was deserted except for Kuznetsov’s pale and long-faced aide Dolohov loitering in one corner. There was really no other way of putting it, the bloody fool wasn’t even smoking. Just standing around with his hands in his pockets and staring at the treetops like they were God’s fucking gift to mankind. Probably because he couldn’t afford the cigarettes, not the ones the Russian politicos seemed to fancy at any rate, Rodolphus observed, taking in the poor draping of the man’s robes with an experienced eye.

“Awful weather, isn’t it?” he remarked conversationally. “Cigarette?”

Dolohov took the offered cigarette wordlessly and let Rodolphus light it with the tip of his wand.

“No,” said Rodolphus, determinedly continuing the conversation on his own. “I don’t like the snow much myself either, though it does make the countryside rather pretty, what?”

A single raised eyebrow was the only sign Dolohov gave that he’d heard this comment at all.

“Though I suppose if I was you, I’d find it awfully boring,” said Rodolphus. “What with all the - snow - cold - in Russia - I’ve never been to Russia, is it nice?”

Dolohov removed the cigarette and studied it for a moment, then lightly tapped away some of the extra ash around the end.

“S’okay,” he said.

This put a damper on whatever little high spirits Rodolphus had woken up with and he finished his cigarette in silence. Even if they were on the verge of a bloody war with each other, there was still no reason for a bloke to be rude when a fellow offered him one of his own cigarettes. Of course, it stood to reason he would have. He was willing to bet an entire’s month worth of the best sherry that half the wars in history could have been avoided if only fellows had played by gentlemen’s rules and been polite to each other. Not the goblin wars, however. There was no reasoning with those brutes - get an idea into their head and they wouldn’t let it go for bloody centuries, the little buggers. And then there were the muggles, of course. Which stood to reason because one couldn’t reason with wild animals, after all: the only way to deal with them was the same way one dealt with the rabbits infesting their lawns.

Rodolphus carelessly let whatever little was left of his cigarette fall to the floor and stamped it out with the heel of his boot.

“Nice talking,” he said, punctiliously polite even though all the reply he received for his pains was a stare that could have frozen over this sodding forest, if it hadn’t already been frozen over by the weather first.

Once he had left, Dolohov took his cigarette out of his mouth and turned it round, holding it between his forefinger and his thumb. He stood like this, studying it for several moments, then smiled as though he was enjoying some private joke and flicked it away into a snowdrift further out on the terrace.

He turned and picked up the little slip of parchment Rodolphus Lestrange had dropped while removing his box of cigarettes from his coat and then stepped back into the castle.

\--

 _Tuesday 00:30 sharp_.

\--

“Merlin’s fucking balls,” swore Scrimgeour.

“That’s not the worst part,” Jan said grimly. “The bomb’s already left Russia. But fuck if we know where the bloody thing’s gone to.”

“He said it was the secessionists,” Max said patiently.

“He _said_ it was the secessionists,” said Jan. “He also mentioned bringing them down from the inside. The secessionists are sitting pretty all the way up in north-east Germany, kilometres away from the heart of everything - fine, all right, they have Berlin, but all that gets them is visibility - and why cut your nose to spite your face? Bonn’s too far out west and all the important people from Bonn are all down here or in Munich while the conference is running.”

“It’s a _fucking_ bomb, it can be _fired_ –”

“And they’re _wizards_ – most of them don’t know the first thing about muggles –”

“Stubborn wanker,” Max swore in German.

The two men glared at each other. They’d clearly been arguing this point back and forth for quite some time now.

Ana Novak, who’d been leaning against one of the wooden beams with her arms crossed, listening in silence, peeled herself away with an exasperated eyeroll in his direction.

“If it’s for the secessionists,” she said, “there’s only one place it can go.”

Scrimgeour studied her with some interest. “Such as?”

“You’re not going to take this seriously?” said Max. “Leo, the only place this bloody thing could have been sent is to Berlin and the longer we spend here –”

“Sokolov didn’t drown in the Berezina,” she said, levelly meeting his gaze. “I know you all have secrets, but I have some of my own. He reached Berlin all right and then he made a mistake – you know how you men think with your hearts, not your heads. He visited an old school friend of mine - bet you didn’t know about her, hey? She’s what you might call a Delilah. Sometimes she asks me questions she shouldn’t know how to ask and I always tell her “Drusilla, I run a farm in the middle of fuck-all, Bohemia, how should I know?” Those kinds of questions – that’s why I worried about Max. Sokolov walked straight into the trap she set for him. Drusilla crowed about it. She said: _I have his train ticket Ana; shall I come and visit you in the middle of fuck-all, Bohemia? What fun it will be!_ That _bitch_. They make mistakes, but they never miss the deaths they really mean. He knew where the bomb was going and he was following it.”

She put her hands on her hips and glared triumphantly at them. “Well?”

“It’s a sound theory,” said Scrimgeour. “Certainly explains why the border’s chockablock with your browncoats and all of ‘em hankering for a piece of the action - all wanted to look at my passport –”

“All of them?” demanded Max, looking unusually pale. “What do you mean all of them?”

“Must have been at least four of them –”

“Show me your passport,” said Jan. “Quickly, quickly –”

A long wailing sound went off over head, like the sound of a banshee wailing. Jan closed his eyes.

“So what happens now?” said Ana.

“We get him back over the border,” said Max, jerking his head in Scrimgeour’s direction. “And we make them sweat for their information. Come on.”

He grabbed Jan’s arm and hoisted himself to his feet, hobbling over to Scrimgeour. “They’ll still be two miles out. In this weather, they won’t be able to make it here before the hour. If we strike while we have the advantage, we can lead them a merry dance across the countryside. Ana load the guns, Jan you clear our stuff away – spread it equally over the three bags – we’ll split up once we get out of here, lead them on a wild goose chase – Leo and I will make our plans –”

“But your leg,” Ana protested, looking up from where she was busy setting charms on the two rifles. “You can’t –”

“I can Apparate,” Max said firmly, unrolling a map. “I’m not dead yet – we’ll regroup at the forest edge, by the Grünsbach –”

He caught Max by the elbow. “What in Merlin’s fucking name do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

“Giving you a fighting chance,” Max replied softly, with a glance in his wife’s direction. “What else? I know it’s dangerous. They’ve packed Rostov off to Siberia – you know that, don’t you? All well for Rostov and what he is – but I don’t want to die in some labour camp in the middle of nowhere –”

“You’re not your own man anymore –”

“Look at me –” Max began, cut short by Jan saying ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Scrimgeour watched his friend hobble off to examine the rifles, a vague sense of unease riding up his spine as Max took the rifle from Ana and mock-aimed while she hoisted a backpack over her shoulder and fastened its belt around her waist. For one, the girl was smart, too smart and for another, there was Max’s death wish. This was why they hauled them all down to Vauxhall every month and asked them pointless questions about whether they were feeling quite all right, would he like to go home and have a lie down, maybe a shag, or a cup of tea, get your mind off the field for a bit, hmmm? ‘Course you had to have a passport issued by the British Ministry of Magic to get that kind of treatment and Max was still pointedly Bohemian. Point was: you put the ones who had death wishes on the frontlines where they could do the least damage – or at home – but above all, you kept them as far away from you as possible.

Well the whole thing was a bloody death wish wasn’t it? That was the point.

“I don’t like this,” Jan murmured in his ear as Ana Novak threw her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him with a pointed desperation – a proper farewell kiss and Merlin knew he’d seen too many of those in his time.

“You think it’s going to cause us trouble?”

“You know what they say – still waters run deep.”

Max Novak gently released his wife and then cupped her face, murmuring something indiscernible to her. _Yes_ , he decided _, too smart by half_.

“Interesting thing she said earlier on,” he told Jan. “Just like all you men, thinking with your hearts, not your heads. You didn’t find that interesting?”

Jan lifted one shoulder in half a shrug. “I –” he began.

“We’re ready,” said Max. “Got both your wands, Jan?”

Jan patted his sleeves. “Think you can manage with that leg of yours?”

“Think you can manage the woods, city slicker?” Max retorted with half a grin.

“ _Boys_ ,” said Ana Novak soothingly.

“Any last words Leo?” said Max.

This was the worst part of the job. It kept on going – _life_ kept on going outside their little circle. It never became any bloody easier.

“Better get a fucking move on,” he said. “Been nice knowing you all.”

\--

Dolohov returned to the Yellow Suite by one of the entrances to the smaller rooms. It was early on a Saturday morning and they were all deserted, even the post reserved for their cryptographer. Zorya knew why but midnight seemed to be the witching hour for all their memos to arrive and at seven thirty A.M. on a regular day, their cryptographer would only just be winding up his work to head to bed.

He passed through the main office used by Kuznetsov, nose wrinkling only slightly at the sight of Kuzentsov’s scarf, still draped over his chair. The man had manners to match a pig – but what could one expect? He left quickly and slid into the main room – at this hour, a temporary breakfast room for them and their various political partners – as unobtrusively as he could.

Glinsky was at the furthest end of the table, toying idly with a piece of Parmesan Ham and arguing with the diplomat from Belarus. About Quidditch, of course. The Belgorod Banshees had played the Minsk Mirrisks two days ago in a friendly, and soundly thrashed them two hundred points to a measly one hundred and sixty. The Mirrisks were accusing the Banshees of cheating, but every team who played the Banshees accused them of cheating and this was nothing new. The Banshees had been accused of cheating ever since 1789.

Dolohov touched Glinsky lightly on the shoulder, then bent down and murmured in his ear: “The Rook has landed.”

\--

 _The bird has flown the nest_.

\--

Rodolphus Lestrange went down to the nearest village that evening, determined to stretch his legs despite the bloody weather. While he was there he bought himself a travel guide to the Bavarian forest region, several novelty wood toys for Babs with the vague idea that he could charm them into being vulgar back in his room, four slabs of chocolate, a snow globe to irritate his mother, a sanctimonious wood cut message about home and the heart which would make his father sneer when presented with it, one of those novelty notepads of muggle paper that were so trendy at the moment and fifty metres of strong climbing rope, charmed with an Infinite Extendable Charm.

By then the sky had grown dark with heavy grey clouds and Rodolphus, looking at the rather sad specimen of a church in the middle of the village, decided it was not worth sticking around any longer and returned to the castle.

\--

In the castle, Kuznetsov was replaying the scene on Glinsky’s specialized pair of omniculars over and over again. The excitement of it, of this beautiful piece of evidence, was making him sweat profusely and had turned him as red as a beetroot.

“You’re absolutely certain it’s him?” he said. “You’re sure?”

“Orlov will have the final proof for us by Sunday,” said Glinsky. “If you’re worried about the uncertainty.”

Kuznetsov replayed the scene once more, but what he saw was not a man in brown robes being let through the checkpoint on to the other side by the Bohemian-Moravian Aurors, rather the headlines that would appear on Monday: _Attack on Sovereignty! Comrade Kuznetsov Exposes English Spy On Russian Soil!_

“You must show this to our Comrade Novotny,” he said. “Tell him to alert his Ministry and start a manhunt for the spies.”

“The Ministry has already been informed of this,” said Glinsky. “But I will show Mr Novotny, if you’re absolutely sure you would like him to know?”

Kuznetsov finally placed the omniculars on the table. “Hmmm? What’s that? Yes, yes, tell Comrade Novotny at once - and show Comrade Stauber too, he must see for himself. Now we have the English by the balls, as they say - hey?”

\--

_Bones - Don’t know much about this Dolohov of yours. Spends all his time in Avery’s pocket when he’s in Britain. Hasn’t been seen in or around the Embassy, safe to say he visits on holiday. Very fishy, in my opinion. What is his occupation. What is his position. Have Walpurgises spread fingers abroad?_

_Yours,  
Alastor Moody_

\--

On Sunday morning, Tony Philby stretched himself out like a long, self-satisfied cat and contemplated the horrendous weather and the ugly teal _fleur de lis_ wallpapering from his bed. Not even the dreary atmosphere could dampen his high spirits. Last night he’d reached a most enthralling chapter in the book he was reading, concerning the universality of the figure of the world serpent, its iteration in the Thracian mythos and its uses in Thracian alchemy and warfare. His mind was buzzing with the various possibilities it could have for magic today: whether they could bypass the troublesome problem of the Philosopher’s Stone and if life could be derived from a universal underlying principle of magic itself. He would have to present this idea to Nott and see what he thought about all of it.

Philby stretched again and lazily contemplated the possibility of falling back asleep again. No, no it wouldn’t do. Early bird caught the worm, early academic caught the best ideas.

He got out of bed and then carefully examined the blank piece of note paper lying in the middle of his floor. He turned it this way and that in his hands as though this would change its colour or make it fold up and leap out of his hands. It did neither. It remained fastidiously blank and white. For some reason, this pleased him. He slipped it into his book and then began to pack.

Outside it was still snowing heavily and along the border checkpoint, just about visible through the mist, there were no longer just three or four Aurors but ten of them along with several muggles, all armed, and a muggle artillery vehicle.

\--

_Tinker,_

_Tell Devil the ball’s in his court now_.

_Hunter._

\--

From: _The Daily Prophet_ , 28 Jan 1968, _Special Evening Edition_

 **RUSSIA ACCUSES BRITAIN OF VIOLATING BUDAPEST CONCORDS, FUNDING BRITISH MILITANTS ON RUSSIAN SOIL  
** ‘A deliberate act of provocation’ says Russian Minister for Magic.

ST PETERSBURG  
_By a staff correspondent_

Minister Gregoriev has accused the Ministry of secretly funding British militants on Russian soil with a view to destabilizing the Russian state. In a press conference held today at 5 PM, he claimed that new “evidence” had come to light which proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that our government has knowingly and wilfully funded criminal and terrorist elements of British origin on Russian soil, in a bid to “sabotage” muggle-magic ties in the country and to “sow suspicion” among the states supporting the secessionist independence bid by “framing” each of the allied countries for these actions. He also stated, in his speech, that this was another “provocative” act in a “long series” of “provocative” actions which were no more than an attempt to “undermine and discredit” their support of the secessionists’ independence bid by “framing” them as “nothing more than an opportunistic land-grabbers”.

Such unprovoked acts of aggression, he said, would have to be considered a deliberate violation of the sovereignty of the Russian peoples - one which necessitated the strongest kind of defence to ensure it would not be repeated again. These actions could not be allowed to continue unchecked and unhindered, he said, and they would extend all and any aid to allies who had faced similar violations of the Budapest Concords but who lacked the material strength and ability to respond in kind.

“Our cousins in East Germany have reached out to us and expressed concerns that this is merely the prelude to a larger planned attack designed to thwart their bid for independence and to forcibly merge them with their government in Bonn,” he said to the press. “We, along with ten other ally countries, have promised them full protection against any forcible attempts at assimilation or unprovoked acts of aggression. To this end, we have sent several Auror troops to aid our brethren against the tyranny of the Grindelwaldian government in Bonn being backed by the British and their state-funded terrorists. From here on, further violations of the Budapest Concords will be dealt with under martial law and anyone suspected of affiliations to or of being terrorists is liable to be rounded up and brought in for questioning, irrespective of diplomatic status.”

When pressed for further details about the alleged “evidence”, the Minister declined to answer further, stating that the evidence would be revealed “very soon” and would “incontrovertibly shake the British case” at the ongoing talks being held in southeast Bavaria. The head of the Department for International Magical Cooperation, Oswald Montmorency, said this was no more than a “scaremongering” tactic and a “transparent” attempt to draw attention away from the serious abuses of power and violations of the Berlin Convention taking place in the Alliance of Muggle-Cooperative countries. “If he has any proof, which I doubt he has, he can bring it forward so we can examine and refute it,” he said, “we’ve said it once, we’ve said it before - we will not be browbeaten into a retreat as we were at Berlin, seventeen years ago.”

In the interim, reports indicate that the number of Auror troops posted along the borders Germany shares with the members of the AMC bloc have been significantly increased. An emergency conference between the Ministers of Germany, France and Britain is to be held later this evening to determine what is to be done in response to what Oswald Montmorency has called “an outright declaration of war”.

Minister Leach could not be reached for comment at the time.

**\--**

“In light of the evidence we have presented to the members of the ICW present, we find it impossible to reach a compromise which is fair and satisfactory. These actions, in particular, the theft of the nuclear device from Russian territory in blatant contravention of Section 44 of the Budapest Treaty, have betrayed the deceitfulness and the true Grindelwaldian nature of these governments and by extension, their unwillingness to accept any political option that occurs outside the purview of Grindelwaldian style magisupremacy. We find ourselves unable to submit to the rule of such governments and indeed, find it our moral duty to refuse to sign any treaty with these Ministries. Given the aggressive nature of these actions, we feel our plea for greater security and martial protection from our larger allied states is not unwarranted. As such, we declare our claimed border regions closed to the rest of the country until such time as the Ministry in Bonn and the British and French Ministries are held responsible for their acts of unprovoked aggression and domination on independent soil and penalized appropriately in the ICW courts.”

**\--**

Memo from the Office of the Minister For Magic, London, to the Embassy for Britain, Bonn.  
**Status:** Confidential, High Priority.  
**Dispatched:** 10:45 PM GMT, 28 Jan 1968  
**Via:** LON-BNJ Tr.Ntl Floo  
**Arrived:** 11:55 PM CET, 28 Jan 1968  
**Received by:** H. Bletchley at 12:00 AM CET

Inform Minister Ammendorf that Britain will be sending ten Auror squads as a peacekeeping taskforce.  
\- N. Leach.

Memo from the Office of the Minister For Magic, London, to the Embassy for Britain, Munich, redir. Office for the Representative for European Affairs to the ICW, Schloss Rabenstein.  
**Status:** Confidential, High Priority.  
**Dispatched:** 10:48 PM GMT, 28 Jan 1968  
**Via:** LON-MUC Tr.Ntl Floo  
**Arrived:** 11:54 PM CET, 28 Jan 1968  
**Received by:** G. Montefior at 11:59 PM CET

Damn you. Damn all of you.  
\- N. Leach.

\--

That fateful morning, on the twenty-ninth of January, Tony Philby woke up to two things: a slim and oblong package on his dresser from one Aleksandr Basmanov who resided in Moscow, and a copy of _The Sol_ , thoughtfully left there along with his morning tea by the resident house elf. He ignored the package and summoned the tea tray to him - then shook out the newspaper and studied the headline. _The Sol_ had won its exclusive at last, straight from the heart of Bohemia-Moravia.

 ** _STAND-OFF: BORDER TENSIONS HEIGHTEN FOLLOWING EXPOSURE OF BRITISH SPY RING IN NOVÀ PEC  
_** Minister Leach denies allegations, formally breaks peace pact with AMC countries.

\--

For the two weeks which had followed Alyosha’s disappearance, Amelia Bones had sat tight with the uncomfortable knowledge of the missing bomb and his last warning – no, not warning, that strange elliptical answer he’d given when she’d asked him ‘why me’- _you’re very kind – innocent_ – weighing heavily on her shoulders. His insistence troubled her. Scrimgeour was the one with all the secrets, who spent his time weaving webs and networks of informants across the eastern landscape, all the way from Berlin to Moscow and St Petersburg. He was part of the game and she was not and Alyosha had trusted her with the information – _you’re not like the rest of us_ – and not Scrimgeour. There were so many different ways he could have meant it, not all of them as dire as they seemed. It could have simply been that Scrimgeour was out gallivanting about the countryside that night and Alyosha, aware of his impending arrest, had found it necessary to pass this knowledge on into the right hands so something could be done with it. On the other hand – _Dresden rules_ – did spies know when they were about to be shelved? Maybe Scrimgeour had arrived at the same conclusion as Black had and maybe Alyosha had sensed a certain coolness and distrust. They joked about the Vauxhallers being heartless, but it had to hurt somewhere – being put out in the cold, like an unwanted kitten. Even unwanted kittens got better, quicker deaths. Maybe it was none of these things at all.

She told herself it was because a certain part of her distrusted Black and Lestrange and the only time she could have told Rufus was that evening over tea. As far as self-deception went, this was one of her sadder attempts. The fact of the matter was all of this – the secrecy, the bloody _Dresden rules_ – had got to her and every time she thought about telling Scrimgeour, the distrustful part of her (unsurprisingly, it sounded almost like old Mad-Eye) kicked its heels and dug in – and the words tumbled out in sentences she had never meant to say in the first place. _Hideous weather isn’t it. Merlin, Dolohov looks like such a rat. Any news about Rostov_?  If she continued like this, she’d become exactly like old Mad-Eye, except of course, Mad-Eye would never have sent a fellow Auror into the field without a full briefing – not without the full facts and not in a tinderbox situation where everything could go up in flames without warning. The strangest sensation was knowing she’d done this without a single qualm and on the thinnest sliver of suspicion. She’d always known her strength was kindness: the thought of being ruthless terrified her.

There was no point being committed to a – dead or hanged or imprisoned or whatever the fuck had happened – man’s memory now: they were in over their heads, there were more than just Aurors along the border – there were muggles with their guns slung over their backs and funny looking cars with their tops cut off and what looked like the large barrel of a gun mounted on the rear, somewhere on the other side Scrimgeour was discovering what Amelia had known for two weeks now, there was a mole in London and a mole on their side. The witching hour had struck.

“I should have told you earlier,” she said. “I would have – you know how it was, with our people disappearing all over the place – I wasn’t sure if it was right, or if Rostov was being fed chickenfeed.”

“Or if Rostov was lying,” said Black.

“Or if Rostov was lying,” she echoed, uncomfortably. “It’s not everyday someone tells you there’s a missing bomb on its way to you.”

Black smiled. “What do you want me to do?”

“Do?”

“Yes,” he said, taking a sip from his glass of sherry, a concession to these troubled times and the late hour. “Do, Miss Bones. You must have come here with at least some idea, however vague, of some kind of action we could take.”

Lestrange looked up from where he was tinkering with the old gramophone on one of the side tables. “Is there something we can do, sir?”

Black raised a single shoulder. “Anything’s possible, dear boy, if we’re willing to put our minds to it.”

It was still snowing outside, she observed. Soft, heavy flakes that clung to the window before melting and disappearing. The snow would be soft and soft snow left footprints. Wherever he was, Scrimgeour would have left a fine pair of prints for them to find. Size eleven, rubber sole, regular pattern, very obviously British make. That morning, _The Sol_ had carried a story about a British spy ring which had been exposed, based out of the village nearest to this border. By the afternoon, the Bohemian-Moravian Auror office was out in full force along with their muggles and their hounds – and not long after that, there was the sound of heavy engines rumbling distantly in the forest below. They would say it was an army exercise once it was done. The Obliviators were excellent at coming up with excuses. A military exercise to keep them all on their toes. Scrimgeour was down there somewhere, or worse, further in where anybody could look and see: size eleven, rubber sole, British issue only. She had done this. She had done this, all on her own.

“I haven’t the faintest,” she said, as the nauseous sensation rose in her throat. “I don’t know – it’s out of our hands now, isn’t it?”

\--

Tony Philby flipped the lid down and locked his case. The hands on the little wooden cuckoo clock on his wall rested at 8:47 PM precisely. He took the package from his dresser, opened it and began to read.

\--

“I’m afraid so,” said Black, studying his glass. “Without tangible evidence don’t have much of a leg to stand on.”

“You don’t think they’ll buy Rostov’s disappearance as proof enough?”

“Our friends will,” said Black. “But they’re hardly the ones who need convincing.”

With a shrill whistle accompanied by shrieking strings and the high pitched rattle of a xylophone, the gramophone kicked into life and Lestrange stood back, hands in his pockets, surveying his handiwork with satisfaction.

“My dear boy,” said Black, raising his voice to make himself heard over the trumpets and the drums. “I heartily endorse your interest in the obscurer parts of our culture, but is it necessary for us to listen to – Vaganov or whoever it is this time, at full volume?”

“Radetzky, sir,” Lestrange said, almost automatically as though this was routine, another part of diplomacy for them, as he charmed the volume down. “Sorry.”

“Very modern, one of those experimental composers,” Black said indulgently. “You know the type – puritanical, with an almost Zoucheist treatment of musical theory –”

“Anti-music, sir,” said Lestrange. “It’s the future of sound: sound for the sake of sound, unrestrained by human influence and need.”

“So tedious,” Black murmured. “But the boy loves it. Personally, I prefer something rather more relaxing – Purcell, for example. He has a peculiarly English sentiment to his music that I admire.”

“I’ve tried to convert him,” said Lestrange as he fetched himself a cup of tea. “Purcell’s terribly déclassé nowadays, but one does what one can.”

The strings wailed unhappily and discordantly in the background, clashing horribly – to her ears – with the trumpets.

“It’s all very educational, as you can see,” said Black. “But I fear we’re boring you – to return to the point, no I’m afraid we’re little more than sitting ducks until we have evidence of some sort. Scrimgeour really is our last chance at catching our friend, the mole, and exposing the Russians for what they really are.”

Old Mad-Eye’s cryptic insinuations about ‘our dear friend the mole’ suddenly sprang unbidden to her mind along with Mad-Eye’s latest memo in which he bizarrely claimed Dolohov was not an innocent blood relation of Avery’s, but a Walpurgis and even more hilariously –

“Do you find our straitened circumstances amusing, Miss Bones?” said Black, one eyebrow raised inquiringly.

“No,” she said hastily. “It’s only something Alastor sent us today –”

“Ah, old Mad-Eye,” said Black. “Do entertain us.”

Amelia froze. Mad-Eye had been very particular in his instructions: no one but she or Scrimgeour would read the memo and neither of them would breathe a word to anyone else in their contingent. It was Dresden Rules all the way down if they were to catch the mole – possibly _moles_ – and clean up this show.

On the other hand, Black was waiting expectantly – and this was – well this was Mad-Eye at his paranoid worst.

In the background, the timpanist beat his drums with savage enthusiasm – and distantly, barely audible over the music, was the klaxon sound of sirens. A botched border crossing? A misfired wand? Amelia wished silently that Black’s attention would waver, shift anywhere but her.

“Come now, you’ll hardly deny us the chance to distract ourselves from our ghastly situation,” said Black.

“Well,” she said. “Merlin knows how he gets these ideas into his head, but you know how old Mad-Eye can be – he’s insisting that Dolohov – you know, the long-faced fellow who tails Kuznetsov all the time – is a member of the Knights of Walpurgis – their contact abroad as it were – and that he’s not working for the Russians at all –”

“Does he now?” said Black, amused. “Good old Mad-Eye.”

“Well it’s not half as preposterous as the rest of his message - I can imagine why he’d suspect Dolohov,” she said, “he’s not exactly the most innocent looking person around – but to claim that our Ministry’s mole’s one of the Department Heads and a Walpurgis to boot and – oh Merlin I can’t say it, it’s too ridiculous –”

“Please Miss Bones,” said Black. “This is all immensely entertaining.”

“Can you imagine?” she said. “He says Scrimgeour’s mole is either you or Lestrange.”

There was a crash and the sound of porcelain shattering. Behind the sofa where Black was seated, stood Lestrange with a saucer in one hand and a hunted expression on his face.

“Slipped,” he said, hastily schooling his expression into one of contriteness. “The tea – I’ll –”

“You’ve given Miss Bones a frightful start, dear boy,” said Black, as Lestrange evanesco’d the mess. “Poor thing’s as white as a sheet. Are you all right, my dear?”

Somehow she managed to form her mouth around the words and force them out. “Quite all right.”

Poor old Mad-Eye. The fucking price of genius. The boy who fucking cried dementor. And Scrimgeour, out in the fucking snow hunting for the mole – the _mole_ – and who, she realized now with the benefit of hindsight, had walked straight into a trap, but not the one Black had been worried about at all: if Black had ever been worried in the first place, that is.

Really, one had to admire the audacity of it all.

She lifted her tea cup and took an overlarge sip and added, “Just startled, that’s all.”

“Of course,” said Black, seemingly amused by this. “Would you like to lie down?”

“No.” Too hasty, too hasty Bones, nothing out of the ordinary. “I have some paperwork I’d like to finish - if you don’t need me any longer?”

“Ma’am?” said Corner, the young Auror trainee, from the doorway. He looked about as frightened as she felt.

“Yes, Corner?”

The boy swallowed nervously and licked his lips. “One of the muggle soldiers shot down an English spy while he was trying to cross the border back – well, here. They’ve put the border zone on full alert and waived the ban on Unforgivables.”

“Well, well,” said Black. “What does Ludeka say?”

“Only that they’ll match ‘em for everything they’ve got,” said Corner. “Are you going to do something, sir?”

This seemed to amuse Black further. He waved his hand carelessly.

“Do? No – I don’t have work for you, but you will stay until you’ve finished your tea, won’t you Miss Bones?” he said. “No, Corner – till our spy surfaces at one of our consulates, the best thing we can do for him is deny everything and send the Germans reinforcements. It’s all out of our hands, dear boy – don’t look so terrified – there’s nothing we can do but wait.”

\--

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” Scrimgeour snapped.

“Don’t be a stubborn ass,” Max retorted. “It’s not your decision to make.”

“It’s my sodding responsibility as your commanding officer -”

“I resign,” said Max. “Now give me the bloody gun.”

“Don’t be a fucking twat -”

“I said I resigned,” Max nearly shouted. “Give me the bloody gun before I hit you.”

Scrimgeour held it out of reach. “What about Ana?”

“What about Ana?” snarled Max. “She’s capable, she can fend for herself -”

“Bloody Merlin, he talks about fending for herself – and how do you suppose she’ll fucking feel about this?”

Max grinned: a ghoulish simulacrum of the real thing. “She’ll be angry at you, she’ll grieve, she’ll even want to die – and then she’ll fall in love and move on. I’ve seen it happen, haven’t I? They always leave the dead behind.”

The rustling in the forest behind them was growing louder as the soldiers and Aurors with their hounds came closer as they combed the forest for any sign of them. They could have been on the other side of the country for all it fucking mattered to Scrimgeour. He was thinking about the way Ana had kissed Max and whether an implicit agreement had been made in that fleeting moment.

“You can’t hold them off singlehandedly,” he told Max. “Bloody Merlin, you can’t throw your life away just because you want to play the fucking hero one last fucking time.”

Max said nothing, simply tilted his chin high and stared proudly at him.

“I hope the bugger at the Styx refuses to take you across,” Scrimgeour grumbled, unslinging the gun he’d acquired from a muggle soldier they’d knocked out earlier on.

“Here,” said Max. “Prop me up against the tree – I’ll be out of their line of sight.”

“You’re a bloodyminded idiot, you know,” said Scrimgeour, as he eased Max into a sitting position against the trunk of the tree. The man was pale and sweating profusely, his breath coming in short ragged stutters. He would have died soon anyway, Scrimgeour reasoned. The fever and the exhaustion, coupled with the exposure, would have killed him off not long after. This was a mercy, in its own fucking way. Not everyone got to choose how they wanted to die.

“Ah, but if I wasn’t a bloodyminded idiot, we would have never met in the first place,” said Max. “Now go, for God’s sake, go before they catch you.”

Scrimgeour gripped Tomáš Železný alias Max Novak by the shoulder. “You’re a bloody fool,” he said. “Give them hell.”

He took off up the hill in long, loping strides. He did not look back. If he did, that ugly thing called honour would rear its head and he’d have to turn. _Reckless, stubborn, too ready to fight_ \- _yes, you could do well in Gryffindor_ , was the Sorting Hat’s verdict years ago. In the end, the sensible and pragmatic part of him, the part which left friends behind to die for – for what? The greater fucking good, that was the joke – the part which had no qualms about the means as long as the ends were won, had won out and he had gone to Slytherin.

The _dakka-dakka-dakka_ of machine gun fire continued for nearly twenty minutes before it went silent. He kept going. Tomáš had his heroic death. Ana, the poor girl, would probably never marry again, too burned from years of being married to a spy – years of learning to live looking over her shoulder. That was the problem of marrying someone who was too smart. They learned your trade and you’d never realize it, until the very end. And once you’d learned it you could never go back, because back was a place only those who’d never done their time in the trade could go.

One single shot rang out and then the forest fell completely silent.

A few hundred feet up the hill, the floodlights glinted off barbed wire. In a few moments, he would be in the anti-Apparation zone, a sitting duck for a trained Auror looking for any movement inside the trees, any blurring, any warping of space which indicated a Disillusionment Charm.

He raised his wand to cast the spell anyway and as he did, a single bullet whizzed through the trees and lodged itself in his knee.

“Bloody fuck,” he hissed, stumbling forward. “Bloody hell.”

Gripping the trunk of a nearby tree, he hauled himself straight and leaned against it. The wound was dark, almost unnoticeable in the light filtering through the trees. He pinched at the area and winced at the sensation. The bullet must have shattered against the bone and buried itself deep inside the flesh, but there was no time to sit down and extract the shrapnel. Someone from above would come along and patrol the area soon, or else one of the searchers from below would come up and find him.

“Tergeo,” he muttered. For a moment the blood dried up and the wound closed, before reopening again, bleeding worse than before. He did this three times and each time, the wound reopened worse than before.

“Merlin’s fucking balls,” he hissed. He tore a length of cloth from the bottom of his robes, bound it tightly around the wound and began hobbling along, keeping inside the line of trees.

Not long after, the sirens started. The patrol would have found the trail, the fucking blood and his footprints in the snow. Scrimgeour grit his teeth and forced himself into a limping run. The section of the border where the Grünsbach passed from Germany into Bohemia was close now – he could hear the rushing of the stream, swollen from the heavy snow, above the sound of the sirens.

A little way ahead, a twig cracked. Ana Novak stepped out from under the trees, clutching that gun of hers to her chest. She looked as strange and hard-faced as she had the evening he’d arrived at the barn.

“You’ve been shot,” she said.

“Oh well done,” he said irritably. “Full points for observational skills. Where’s Tomáš?”

Her face tightened. “He’s gone.”

One single shot. Right.

“Died fighting, did he?” he asked her, as casually as he could.

The gun jerked – not a lot, but enough.

“Close enough,” she said tonelessly.

“Well I hope he’s fucking happy now,” he said, limping on his way. “Go home, go home – there’s nothing you can do here –”

“I can get you across the border,” she said. “There’s a gap in the fence they don’t know about yet because it’s charmed to look like there isn’t one. I can get you there.”

Scrimgeour turned to look at her. There was nothing, no desperation. Just that hard unflinching expression. _Determined_ , he thought. Yes, that was it. Determined.

“On what condition?” he asked her.

“I want a British passport. British citizenship. A full pension – Tomáš would have got one, wouldn’t he? In British galleons. I’m not coming back here,” she said. “You saw what you lot did to Tomáš, what happened to him. I’m not going to play bumboy to the British whenever they need someone to do their dirty work for them.”

 _You could hardly be a bumboy_ , he almost said out loud, before he bit his tongue.

“And what about Jan?”

“What about Jan?” she asked him impatiently. “He’s dead. What did you think?”

“And you made it out here alive.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t shoot him. So you can stop looking at me like that.”

He grinned. “Habit of the trade,” he said. “Fine, I’ll make sure you get all of this – Merlin knows I can’t swim up the bloody stream with my leg like this, so it’s not as though I have much of a choice, do I? Mind you, if they catch you with me, they’ll kill you on the spot.”

She shrugged. “It’s better than a labour camp.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “All right. I’ll make sure you get all of this. Show me this place.”

\--

At midnight, Rodolphus Lestrange took the rope he’d bought down at the village and ascended one of the deserted towers in the western wing.

\--

Amelia was wrapping up work for the night – though it was inaccurate to call it work, when all she’d done was stare out of the window and fret, wondering what Black and Lestrange would say when Scrimgeour finally turned up dead – when the young trainee Boot came barging into her room without warning.

“Don’t you ever knock on doors?” she snapped irritably.

“Sorry,” he said breathlessly, “it’s just – the light was on – you have to come immediately – emergency –”

“Emergency?” she said, flicking her papers away with her wand. The boy was white as a sheet and looked as though he was about to puke. “What happened?”

“Scrimgeour,” said Boot. “There was – blood - and I saw his bone – I saw his _bone_ – bloody Merlin, you have to come –”

She caught him by the arm and shook him, not unkindly.

“You need to calm down,” she told him, pushing him gently outside the room and locking the door behind her. “Has anyone seen him?”

“N – no,” he said. “I don’t think so – Corner brought him straight to his – Corner’s that is – room and he was the only one on patrol there.”

“Good,” she said. “And you didn’t tell Black or any of the others?”

“I came straight to you – he was asking for you – he’s,” Boot lowered his voice, “he has a strange woman with him – I thought –”

“No,” she said sharply. “Don’t _think_ – you’re not to mention any of this to anyone, you understand?”

He nodded, petrified. “Not a word.”

“Good boy.”

Boot, she discovered, hadn’t been exaggerating about the blood. There was a trail all the way along that final corridor until they reached Corner’s room - and then it really was everywhere: on Corner’s robes and hands, the sheets and the floor and Scrimgeour himself, lying on the bed and cursing like a sailor at everyone who came near him.

“Boot,” she said, taking one look at the boy, who had gone a weird and sickly green. “Go clean up the mess – all the way, in the courtyard – everything you can find, even the lift. You’re no use to us here – Corner – tell me exactly what happened – I’ll take this from here, thanks.”

Corner rattled on, clearly frightened but not hysterical the way Boot was, as she examined Scrimgeour’s leg. The wound itself was tiny, an almost insignificant puncture in his knee but the blood –

“Don’t,” said Scrimgeour through his teeth. “I’ve tried healing it – doesn’t work – makes it worse.”

“A cursed bullet?”

“Seems like,” he said. “Bloody muggles.”

“We don’t use cursed weapons,” said the dark-haired woman, from the corner of the room where she was sitting.

She murmured a diagnostic spell and studied the thin strands of light weaving their way inside the wound.

“You must be Ana Novak,” she said without looking up. “Amelia Bones. Sorry about this – Corner, come here and take a look at this, ever seen anything like this?”

Corner peered at the wound, idiotically long hair flopping into his eyes. “Never seen it before. If it’s a runic curse, it’s not one of the standard ones – not Aramaic, Futhark or Nordic, ain’t Cyrilic either, far as I can tell – unless someone’s found a new way to combine this shit – sorry, sorry –”

Amelia sighed. “You didn’t see where the bullet came from?”

“Nevermind the sodding bullet,” snapped Scrimgeour. “We’ve got work – _bloody mother of_ – can’t you be gentle? Listen here Bones, there’s no use wasting time over this leg. Nevermind about the boy, you can keep your mouth shut, can’t you Corner?”

“They’d have to kill me to get me to speak, sir.”

“Right,” said Scrimgeour. “No need for all of that. Listen here Bones, the Russians have been carting all kinds of weapons round the countryside for their secessionist friends, we know this. Well they’ve sent one of their bombs down here, right to this sodding castle – some drunk idiot spilled the whole story to Max, about how they were going to take us down from inside, so it stands to reason – fine - we’ve already had one sodding round of bombs with those explosive howler charms on that trunk, but this time round they’ve sent a nuclearized device – you understand Bones? Six kilotons of pure explosive power – maybe more –”

He was yelling now: “The whole castle would be turned into fucking rubble – Half the mountain and half the forest ‘round here – what in Salazar’s fucking name does one fucking leg have to do with any of this? Doesn’t fucking matter!”

“Bloody hell,” whispered Corner. “He’s gone bonkers, hasn’t he?”

Amelia ignored him.

“Shut up,” she hissed. “Shut up will you? _I know all of this._ You’ll bring the whole bloody place down on us – bloody Merlin, I’ll get Philby to take a look at your leg, all right? No place like home, for finding moles.”

“You bitch,” Scrimgeour hissed through his teeth. “Keeping secrets from me – fucking – fine, fine – yes the sodding mole – have it your fucking way then. Send Philby down here – but fucking hurry.”

Amelia sprinted up the stairs and down the corridor and this was her first mistake. Her second one was pausing to knock on the door to Philby’s room before pushing it wide open – the lights were on, she reasoned, and if he’d been serious about keeping someone out, he’d have locked it. Philby stood rooted to the floor in the centre of the room, staring at her aghast. In his hands and spread out over the bed were what looked remarkably like blueprints, except they weren’t for a building and there was one sketch, one complete sketch, which looked like it could have walked straight out of East London in the early forties – things they were still digging up every now and then and the Muggle Liaison Office would be carted off to clear it – one more unexploded shell from the Blitz – a bomb, _a fucking bomb_ \- and on the floor, lying on its side, wide open and empty was the box the terrorist-assassins had left their bomb in – _you know_ , _I’m afraid that box will have to go to London, I haven’t the faintest idea how to open it, I’m terribly sorry Bones_ – and her _third_ mistake was forgetting all about the Dresden rules: _always be aware_.

Something hard struck her on the back of her head, the world went black and slid away from her as she fell to her knees, unconscious.

\--

She woke up in complete darkness and with something hard and poky sticking into her back. Several moments fumbling around in the dark revealed that her assailant, whoever it was – _Lestrange_ , the excitable part of her supplied helpfully – was either stupid – _Lestrange_ , it insisted again – or had panicked badly when she entered the room: her wand, no her _spare_ wand, was still safe inside her sock.

“Lumos,” she said.

A broom cupboard. Of fucking course. She’d have expected something more creative from Philby, but if Lestrange had been calling the shots while Philby was doing – whatever the fuck he was doing with the plans for a bomb – which was why she was here in the first place, because Philby had been doing whatever the fuck he was doing with those plans bang in the middle of his room where anyone could have seen him, so maybe Philby wasn’t all that smart either in the first place – well of course Lestrange would have put her here.

The insides of the cupboard began to spin again at this point, so Amelia pointed her wand between her eyes and breathed _Ennervate_. Not the Auror school sanctioned method of recovery - _best let your head recover on its own, chances are you’ll cock something up or ennervate yourself and never realize you’ve got a bloody concussion until it’s turned dangerous_ \- but presumably the rules didn’t apply when you were on a mission to salvage a political crisis, prevent a war and get rid of a bomb. The bomb. _The bomb_.

Merlin but Rufus was going to gloat later when she told him about Philby. He’d lose his leg, but win the larger battle for his ego, so it all worked out in the end. Sort of.

She pushed herself as far back away from the door as possible, then pointed her wand at it and cast an _expulso._ The force of the spell wrenched one of the doors right off its hinges and she winced as it clattered to the floor, thunderously loud in the stillness that settled over the castle at night. She scrambled to her feet hastily and fled from the scene before Nottenhaft or one of the house elves could come around and have hysterics over the door lying sadly by itself a few feet away. Black could foot the bill later, she thought maliciously. It’d serve him right for pushing them all into this fucking mess in the first place.

The room was empty when she reached it. Not a single trace that Philby had been living there remained except for a single blank sheet of muggle notepaper, crumpled up and flung carelessly into a corner of the room, just a few inches left of the wastepaper basket as though Philby had been so bored he’d taken to target practice for fun. The courtyard below was deserted too, no footprints in the snow either as far as she could see, so they couldn’t have left by the lift. She leaned out of the window and squinted up at the sky as best as she could with the snow driving into her face – but nothing.

Amelia pulled the window shut and frowned. They could hardly have disappeared from inside the castle. There were anti-Apparation spells and other wards which prevented people from entering and leaving except by the lift, or if they were insane and athletic enough: by climbing straight up the side of the mountain. She pictured it for a moment: Philby with his silly shagpile robes, struggling down the mountainside, with a bomb under one arm and his bag under the other. Hysterical laughter swelled inside her chest at the thought. The whole thing was preposterous. Philby – the city slicker in his shagpile robes – she could barely imagine him hiking across the Brecon Beacons. Lestrange, on the other hand, Lestrange seemed the kind of silly ass who divided his time equally between strutting around at his clubs in dress robes and endlessly trekking through the mud for a good shoot. Which was – well – she couldn’t exactly point _fingers_ – what with the whole having learnt how to shoot at around the same time she learned how to walk and – _oh_ –

 _Lestrange_.

A snarky, offhand comment of Corner’s earlier last week at dinner came to mind: _Merlin Lestrange, the way you spend all your time up in that tower, you’ll turn into a bat if you’re not careful_. For some reason, the comment had irritated Lestrange much more than it should have and he’d turned viciously on Corner, enough that Corner had hurriedly backtracked with an _all right no need to get your wand in a twist_ and then spent the rest of the dinner making faces at Lestrange’s back.

It was a long shot, but it was worth the try.

She climbed the final flight of stairs up the tower, taking care to tread lightly. One round of mistakes was enough. Twice was sheer bloody carelessness. _Dresden rules_ , Alyosha’s voice hammered at her thoughts. _Dresden rules. Dresden rules. Dresden rules._ Over and over again. Her hands were clammy and trembling. _So help me Rufus_ , she thought wildly, _I’ve been doing your job for you for the past few weeks and better than you_. The mole, the bomb, the threads all coming together - though for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what Black or Lestrange were playing at with sending their intelligence reports to the other side, unless it was some complicated plot to make old Leach look like a fool. She pushed this thought away impatiently. Spilt milk. She was at the top of the stairs now, her fingers grazing the door. There were two pairs of voices murmuring about something on the other side – then silence.

 _Gently. Slow and steady’s the only way to be stealthy_ , was what Mad-Eye always used to say. She slowly eased the door open; heart in her mouth as she prayed to whatever the fuck lived up there in the great beyond, that the Count kept his doors well-oiled, even if he never used them.

He did.

The door swung open without a sound. A single figure in dark robes was half-leaning out of the window, across the room from her. There was a single rope – climbing rope, by the looks of it – looped around the wooden beam across the ceiling. It was stretched taut as it extended downwards – and out the window. Of all the most complicated and harebrained schemes. _Keep It Simple Stupid_ : another one of Mad-Eye’s old aphorisms. Good old fucking Mad-Eye.

The figure – a mask, a fucking mask of all the fucking things – at the window turned. He never stood a chance. Amelia’s stunner hit him in the centre of his chest, flinging him back against the stone wall. His head hit the wall with a single sharp crack and he slumped over, unconscious. She dragged him across the room and kicked him out onto the landing, then shut the door behind her and hastily spelled and warded it. It wouldn’t do _much_ but at least it’d fire all his own spells back at him and _that_ , if she was lucky, would fling him back down the stairs and put him out of action for considerably longer. She then hurried back to the window and leaned out. It was a sheer straight drop down into the forest below, the one part of the castle where the inner and the outer walls merged because the incline of the mountain below was so steep, no invading army in their right mind would have ever attempted an assault on this side. There, nearly some twenty-five feet below her, Philby was slowly rappelling down the castle’s side, two large bags slung across his back. Beneath him, somewhere in the distant darkness was the forest floor. His rope barely even reached halfway down the castle’s outer wall.

“Philby you idiot,” she yelled. “Come back in here, you’ll get yourself killed.”

He glanced up at her and - _grinned_ , the _fucker_ \- then continued scaling the wall.

“It’s all over,” she yelled. “I know what you’ve been up to, I know what’s in the bag -”

“Good for you,” was the reply which drifted up to her.

“This is your last chance, Philby,” she yelled. “I won’t hesitate if I have to bring you in using force.”

If Philby heard her, he showed no sign of it. He continued downwards. In a few moments, he’d be out of her range -

“ _Confringo_ ,” she yelled. There was – well – if she could have, she’d have tried differently – but there was no real way of getting Philby back into that castle alive and against his wishes.

He simply batted the spell away with his wand. “The first rule of duelling,” he yelled. “Never shout your spells, gives your opponent time to prepare.”

She scowled. In quick succession she cast a stunner, a bat bogey hex, a confundus charm, _arresto momentum_ and a seize and pull charm. Philby swung out of the way of all of them except the seize and pull.

“ _Finite Incantatem_ ,” he cried, digging his feet into the wall. The rope from her wand disappeared.

“ _Stupefy_ ,” he yelled as she cast a Stickfast Hex at him. The spells collided midway and held, neither yielding to the other. She closed her eyes and counted. _One. Two. Three –_ she flung her arm out to the side, sending both bolts sparking harmlessly on their way and then swiftly aimed at Philby: a dancing jinx, a jellylegs hex and a fire charm. One of his bags burst into flame.

 _How did the bomb work anyway?_ She should have asked herself that question earlier. While Philby was distracted, putting out the flames on his bag, she cast a shortening and retracting spell on the rope.

“Give it up Philby,” she cried. “Give us the bomb and we’ll let you go.”

“ _Crucio_ ,” he yelled. “Second rule of duelling, Bones: don’t play by the bloody rules.”

He hurled a disintegrating curse at her. She ducked, narrowly missing both curses.

“ _Confringo_ ,” she cried. “ _Expulso. Locomotor Mortis._ ”

The spells exploded harmlessly on either side of Philby, the boy swinging from side to side to avoid them.

“ _Crucio_ ,” he yelled again. The rope was getting shorter, but Philby kept sliding down it – and the fucking thing seemed to go on forever. “ _Crucio. Crucio. Crucio_.”

None of them touched Amelia.

“You can’t win, Philby,” she yelled. “Come away quietly.”

“ _Avada Kedavra_.”

She ducked hastily. The green bolt whizzed past the spot where her head had been only a moment earlier. She pushed herself to her feet, head spinning slightly and her hands shaking. They were clammy with sweat. She wiped her right hand against her robes and picked her wand up from where it had fallen when she’d ducked down.

“It’s all over Philby,” she said, leaning back out of the window. “It’s all over.”

For a moment he simply hung there, suspended in space. _Come on_ , she urged him silently. _Give it up. Go home. Go back to being a nobody from nowhere_. _Give it up. Give up your stupid war._ Then without warning, Philby flung himself to the left - and both his bags to the right.

The response came instinctively, she was moving before she knew what she was really doing. She could die, he could fucking kill her, disembowel her - whatever he fuck he wanted - but if she stopped a war, it would have been fucking worth it.

“ _Drakonmache_ ,” she cried, pointing her wand at the falling bags.

Fire poured out from the end of her wand. It sped down the side of the castle and past Philby, hungry and with all the weight of her fury behind it. _How dare he. How_ dare _he bring them to the brink of war_. _How dare he_ \- for Scrimgeour who was losing his leg, for Minister Leach who would almost certainly be forced out of office over this, for the Ministry, for Berlin - fucking Berlin - for London - but of course Philby was too young, too young to know what war looked like when it was done, the fucking bugger.

The flames curled around the bags: an angry, roaring badger which hung there suspended between the castle and the forest. _Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus._ Hardly anyone bothered remembering it, but it was Helga Hufflepuff who had given the school and thousands of witches and wizards that motto. Travers fancied her too soft, too kind but Travers was a myopic, imperceptive idiot who didn’t understand you could be kind and you could be angry and you could be ruthless all at one go. His loss. The badger curled in on itself, growing smaller and brighter like a star slowly collapsing in on itself – and then with a loud bang and a bright flash of light, it shrunk in on itself disappeared, leaving only a cloud of ashes wafting lazily across the sky in its wake.

It was over. It was over. Philby could run away to the Russians or the secessionists now for all she cared. It was over. Amelia collapsed on the floor, her legs as wobbly as if she’d been struck by a jelly-legs jinx, and sobbed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Calygreyhound, the Nachtkrapp, the Mirrisk, the Siberian Blizzardback and the Ignarium are all taken from [themonsterblogofmonsters](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com). Egritudo augurium (diagnostic spell) and Drakonmache (Fiendfyre) are both incantations created by EssayOfThoughts.
> 
> Several scenes are pastiches of scenes which have appeared in spy fiction: Alexei’s border crossing mimics a similar scene from _The Spy Who Came in From The Cold_ , Max sitting against the tree trunk and shooting down soldiers hunting them is vaguely modelled on a scene from _Guns Of Navarone_ , the whole gimmick with the bomb comes from _The Man From U.N.C.L.E_ and the concept of the moles with their code names is a deliberate reference to _Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy_. Other more oblique references include a slight reference to _The Eagle Has Landed_ (the Rook has landed) and the setting of Mt Adlerhorst  & Schloss Rabenstein is vaguely modelled on the setting of _Where Eagles Dare_.
> 
> Bohemia-Moravia: the northern half of then Czechslovakia. As yet, disunited.  
> Howler-bombs: magically charged howlers used by independence fighters in the former colonial countries of South Asia & Africa. See [here](http://thepostmodernpottercompendium.tumblr.com/post/94669436951/there-were-howlers-loads-of-them-there-must-have).  
> Grimmshel: one of Grindelwald’s fortresses, used by his elite Cadmus Guard for interrogations and special experiments/spell-testing on muggles and squibs. See [here](http://thepostmodernpottercompendium.tumblr.com/post/93537342615/do-you-remember-the-stretcher-cases-lurching-back)  
> MI7: the wizarding counterpart to MI6, concerned only with foreign affairs.  
> The Sol: the only wizarding tabloid. Counterpart to the muggle _The Sun_.  
>  Zoucheist: named after a Baron Zouche who opposed the founding of the English Parliament, arguing this institution would inevitably lead to England's downfall. He based his argument entirely on the assertion that it was the Senate and its (misguided) attempts to reinstitute the Republic which were responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire regardless of historians' views on the subject. The original wizard fascist.  
> Dresden Rules: like the [Moscow Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules) but for wizard spies – a reference to the tradecraft of espionage in the years leading up to Grindelwald’s war.  
> Witch-Watcher Directorate: official title – the Directorate for the Office of Witch-Watchers concerning the Improper Use of Magic. The Russian counterpart to their muggle KGB & GRU.  
> The Ignarium: unofficial name given to the Witch-Watcher Directorate’s HQ, so named because the building is an almost impenetrable black on the outside and no one has ever been able to figure out if this is because of years of accumulated grime, or if the witch-watchers have disturbingly charmed the outsides opaque and watch them as they hurry about Moscow’s magical quarters. Based on the tanks used to keep salamanders, invented by EssayOfThoughts.  
> Krasnoyarsk-53: this does not actually exist irl, though Krasnoyarsk-45 and Krasnoyarsk-67 do. A play on the Russian secret cities.  
> Budapest Concords: A treaty agreement concerning the sovereignty of nations, their borders & the terms and conditions concerning what includes agreeable/legal espionage and what does not.  
> Tinker, Devil, Hunter: Tinker = Mulciber, Devil = Abraxas, Hunter = Orion Black. Other members of the conspiracy include: Soldier = Lestrange, Sailor = Nott, Tailor = Avery, Rich man = Nottenhaft, Spy = Dolohov. A reference to _Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy_.


	3. The Third Casualty

**fallout**

“You understand, of course, how this is going to look to the public,” said Abraxas Malfoy, idly polishing the handle of his cane. “I don’t particularly care much for public opinion, but there will be a public inquiry and the press is almost certain to say all kinds of nasty things about it when it comes out that you were the one who signed off on that declaration of war, even though Black advised you to continue denying the fact that a British spy had been shot on the wrong side of the German-Bohemian border.”

Nobby Leach, thinner and paler and more ill-looking than he had been at the start of last year, stared blankly out of his false-charmed window, Abraxas Malfoy’s words little more than background noise to the cacophony of thoughts, sounds, half-fragments  of sentences and words assailing him. He had given in to the whispers and nearly brought Britain to the brink of war, but now when he looked back he found he could not place who had said what to him and when – only that the idea had seized him, taken possession of him and like a man possessed he had imagined he was invulnerable, he could do anything: they could beat them all back into their homes and prove once and for all that Britain and Britain alone stood mighty, towering high over the rest of them. He tried picking out dates, moments, anything tangible at all, but there was nothing. It was all one long feverish blur, bright and technicoloured and an incoherent jumble of sound and light - and _dammit_ , why couldn’t he remember the names?

“Kuznetsov’s resigned already,” Malfoy was saying. “I don’t imagine he was given a choice in the matter. The man was distinctly unsuited to the job – handled the business with all the skill and subtlety of an erumpent – pointing fingers without bothering to investigate first. One has to be prepared to take the consequences if one’s set on behaving like a tantruming child. I must say, I’m not sad to see him – or Stauber, for that matter – go. I suppose that’s the silver lining for us, eh? No more secessionists raising Cain and making life hell for us. Of course neither of them were battling deadly illnesses which makes their actions quite unforgivable – that’s _your_ silver lining, heh?”

Was it an illness? Yes, he supposed it was. Yes, he was ill. He couldn’t pinpoint names or dates, distinct phrases and what he did have was so ephemeral it could have come to him in a fever dream. For four years, Nobby Leach had fought to keep his head above the waters, but the waters, it seemed had won. Malfoy had offered him an out. Without the names, dates and places he would never survive in a hostile Wizengamot court. But he could be free. He could push away the fever blur and return to the land of dreary middle class English life. Maybe buy himself a cottage in Cornwall and nail a sign: _no visitors allowed_ : to the door. There would be a garden. A small garden with geraniums and chrysanthemums – no he’d go all out and win the village competition for the best garden each year. And no one would have the faintest idea that he, Nobby Leach, had once nearly brought Britain and Russia to blows with each other. He would a plain old nobody from nowhere, some batty old sod, living out his days pottering happily around in his garden. Yes, yes. That was what he would do: a private life, not a public one – and all of them could go sod themselves for all he cared. He turned away from the window, removed his hands from his pockets and leaned against his desk.

“Tell Bole to draft me a resignation speech,” he said.

* * *

The three of them stood together on the Parliament bridge, watching the waters of the Thames drifting along below them, grey and ugly from the endless English mizzle. It was strange, after the endless black and white of the south German winter: colorful and yet pleasantly dreary, as though everything was tainted by the grumbling, boring leviathan of British bureaucracy. _Please fill out forms fourteen, thirty and forty-one before we can verify your application for leave_. Strange and infuriating and yet oddly comforting. Life continued on its way. Forms were filled and refilled, then signed in duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate. Bureaucracy continued, along with the mizzle and the smog, even though she was now the proud recipient of the Order of Merlin.

“It’s odd,” she said, fingering the medal. “I don’t particularly feel heroic. I don’t feel we did a particularly good job either. ”

 “There’s nothing we can do about it,” said Scrimgeour. “A single smashed teacup isn’t going to stand up in the Wizengamot as incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy.”

“So what happens?” she asked the two of them. “We twiddle our thumbs and wait?”

“Black and Lestrange,” said Mad-Eye thoughtfully. “You’re sure you got everything?”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “Philby could have kept the plans on himself, or given them to someone else.”

“Lestrange,” said Scrimgeour. “No need to be so Hufflepuff about it.”

“Someone else,” she said pointedly.

“I don’t like it,” said Mad-Eye, abruptly. “It’s all too neat.”

“Well we’ll all toddle along and hand in all our OME’s and tell them thanks but no thanks, the whole thing was solved too neatly for our comfort so we can’t accept this in good conscience, shall we then?” said Scrimgeour.

“You don’t see the pattern?”

“Yes yes,” Scrimgeour replied testily. “Get rid of all the blasted muggleborns and get someone who knows The Way Things Are Done instead _and_ eliminate the secessionist threat with one swift stroke, we know all that and it’s not a pattern, Alastor. So a couple of purebloods executed a coup. Don’t sound like a _conspiracy_ to me –”

“Not if they had the plans,” she said slowly. “I think that might make it a conspiracy.”

Rufus looked away, jaw working angrily as he stared out over the river.

Mad-Eye grunted. “Well there’s no use crying over spilt milk,” he said briskly. “The Ministry won’t do anything, but I’m damned if I sit around while these buggers run holes through the fabric of the Ministry, with or without proof they have the plans.”

“You’re still set on it,” said Rufus, coldly.

“Yes I am,” said Mad-Eye, equally coolly. “Dumbledore’s not the best, but he doesn’t want another Grindelwald again and neither do I.”

“You’re a damn fool,” said Rufus.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you lad,” said Mad-Eye. “I did and y’didn’t listen.”

With that, Mad-Eye strolled away briskly back towards Whitehall, leaving Amelia alone with Scrimgeour. They stood side by side in companionable silence; Rufus glaring angrily at St Paul’s in the distance, Amelia wondering what life under the perpetual threat of imminent destruction would be like – probably nothing would change at all. There would be no investigation, no public inquiry: the Minister had already resigned and as long as the _Prophet_ and the _Sol_ had their metaphorical beheading, no one would think twice about the mysterious Philby and his allies. There was no Philby on the records from the Department of Mysteries. The Department had never received their request for an Unspeakable at all. Somewhere out there, Philby was running wild under a different name. His real one, perhaps. Somewhere out there, it was possible that whoever Philby really was, still had the plans, the key to their annihilation. Somewhere further out east, Alexei Rostov was languishing in a Siberian prison camp – for no bloody reason. If Mad-Eye was right, war was inevitable: it was on their doorstep, just like Kuznetsov had predicted. They’d caught Rostov’s bomb and lost – well they didn’t know what they’d lost yet and that was the worst part.

“Poor old Rostov,” she mused out loud.

“Rostov?” said Scrimgeour. “He’ll be fine. He’s got friends in high places looking out for him and there’s much more to him than meets the eye. Always lands on his feet, Rostov – like a bloody cat. ‘Cept cats have nine lives and Rostov’s just got one bloody long one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked him.

He leaned against the side, shifting his weight on to his good leg. “Use your head, Bones. Bloke can’t have fought in Moscow _and_ the Crimea _and_ still look like he’s pushing thirty, can he now? Didn’t you ever wonder about that?”

“Well of course I did – I just didn’t _think_ ,” she said. “The stories he told – he could be so fanciful sometimes – well, dammit Rufus, what other logical explanation was there?”

“That they were true, of course,” he said, surprised she’d have to ask him a question like this. “You know the stories about the mighty winter and its legendary heroes don’t you? Well why shouldn’t it be true? We’ve got magic, haven’t we? Anything’s possible if you’ve got magic and you’re willing to put your mind to it.”

The simple but ruthless logic behind this struck her so forcibly in its ridiculousness that she goggled at him unbelievingly until he raised an eyebrow at her and grinned.

“We’re just lazy ‘s all,” he said. “Don’t teach our children how to think about magic.”

“Right,” she said, still sceptical. As far as battles went, there were better ones to pick. “So what happens now?”

“Home service,” said Scrimgeour dryly. “You get a medal for heroism and Vauxhall raps your knuckles. I’ve been sent to Ireland. In the words of P: _all you bloody Gaelics are alike, go calm them down_.”

“What a twat,” she said in Welsh.

“You’re too kind,” he told her in Scots Gaelic, then in the Minstry-approved lingua franca: “Hear they promoted you.”

“Salary raise,” she said. “I still have to work under Travers. I’m sorry – by the way, about your leg – I don’t think I apologized for it.”

He snorted. “It makes for a good story down at the pub. Y’ought to think of joining the service – sitting tight on all those bloody secrets.”

She rolled her eyes. “No, thanks I don’t fancy your line of work. How’s Ana doing?”

“Settling,” he said. “She has a nice flat in South Kensington and a job as a Secretary.”

“That sounds drab,” she said. “She must like it, after all the excitement.”

He grinned. “Not when she’s a Secretary for the Circle – she hasn’t quite figured it out yet, don’t want to be around when she realizes what she’s gone and got herself into.”

“You’re a bastard you know,” she said. “A right fucking wanker.”

“And you’re too nice Bones,” he said, pushing himself away from the wall. “Anyway, must be off, work to do, peace to keep etcetera etcetera. Pleasure working with you.”

“Take care,” she said, shaking his hand. “Try not to get shot again.”

He grinned at her and then limped away down the bridge, resting heavily on his cane.

She stood there for a while, fingering the green and purple ribbons on her medal, mind miles away in Berlin as stray fragments from Black’s grand speech in the ICW drifted through her mind. In 1945, one hundred and seventy countries had signed on to the Berlin Convention, a covenant which merged the Statute of Secrecy with the _Declaration les Droits des Sorciers_. In 1951, twenty European countries gathered to solve the problem of Berlin and arrived at an uncomfortable compromise in which the city was forced under emergency rule while the German Minister at the time washed his hands of the city and consigned it to the Auror division. People would remember 1968 as the year they were nearly brought to war by Nikita Kuznetsov’s foolishness and his misguided support for the known terrorist Stauber. Except of course, none of this was true and the only people who would ever know part of the truth about January 1968 were Mad-Eye, Rufus and herself. The whole truth would forever be locked away behind closed doors, as it had been in 1951 and as it had been in 1945 and as it would be, inevitably, again – in some distant and yet unforeseen future. 

It was a rather dampening thought. She turned and walked back up the bridge towards the Parliament building. Beneath the bridge and out of sight, her Order of Merlin tumbled, purple and green ribbons fluttering in the wind, into the waters of the Thames below.

* * *

Up in Cambridgeshire, on the outskirts of a tiny village called Hoxheath, two bright young things were perched in a tree overhanging the river Cam, hidden away from any observers as they enjoyed the last of the 1920 Malfoy vintage. It was a cold day, a bad one for the outdoors but this did not bother the boys much. They were both neither as bright or as young as they used to be six years ago but they seemed unconcerned by this fact either as they sat there perched above the rest of the world, comfortable in the triumph of youth and that delicious feeling of invulnerability it brought with it. The younger one kept rubbing his face, still recovering from the loss of the caterpillar moustached he had painstakingly cultivated for two years. He had a rifle he was slowly stripping, piece by piece, into its various component parts.  

“You could have told me, you know,” said his friend.

“But Dolly darling,” he said, “you go so marvellously red and blotchy when you’re in a temper. Like one of those cherry tomatoes.”

“I would have kept it secret,” Rodolphus said sulkily. “I know all about Him too. I got mine before yours, you know.”

“ _Mon vieux_ you have many wonderful talents I admire dearly, but acting has never been one of them,” Augustus said gently. “You’d never have put your heart into the fight.”

Rodolphus scowled, but said nothing, content to lean back against the tree and watch as Augustus tossed each part of his rifle into the river, one by one, and then lazily transfigured them into water as they sped downstream.

“Besides,” said Augustus leaning back when his rifle was no more, “it hardly matters when who got what, in the end all that matters is _Das Grossere Wohl_ , isn’t it? I read all the pamphlets you sent me Dolly. You wouldn’t send me letters, so I read your pamphlets, every single last one of them.”

“You wrote the most absolute twaddle,” said Rodolphus. “What did you expect?”

“But I told you long before it happened, _mon vieux_ ,” Augustus protested. “One has to know one’s enemies intimately before one can beat them at their own game. Your role’s very different from mine, Dolly dearest, do stop sulking so loudly.”

“You took it didn’t you,” said Rodolphus. “The plans. The bomb.”

“Yes,” said Augustus. “He was very pleased.”

“He should be,” said Rodolphus.

They sat in silence like this, half-leaning against each other with the bottle of wine in between them, for some time, revelling in the lazy aftermath of success.

“You’ll continue like this,” Rodolphus said eventually. “With them.”

“Yes,” said Augustus. “For the sake of all the horrendous children you and the Black girl are going to have – hey, don’t pinch.”

“I won’t pinch if you play nice,” Rodolphus told him.

“But imagine it, Dolly,” crowed Augustus. “A lifetime of reading _Babbity Rabbity_ to your squalling brats. It’s too delicious.”

Rodolphus shoved him and Augustus shoved him back, neither with malice. It was not the season for malice yet. They were older and wiser than they were six years ago, but they were still bright and they were still young and the future seemed so very far away. 

“Here,” said Augustus eventually, taking the bottle of wine and refilling his glass. “Here’s to us fine upstanding and productive members of society. To the future.”

He clinked his glass with Rodolphus’.

“To the future,” echoed Rodolphus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The mighty winter: a reference to ‘the Winter Order’ as it is known to foreigners & to those outside the order itself. A secretive cabal of wix dedicated to the cause of protecting Russia, her interests and her people. Its members are of various political leanings, united by this one cause. They are immortal: their horcrux is quite literally the abstract idea of Russia, formed through the metaphysical killing of the self.  
> The Circle: the wizarding counterpart to MI5, concerned only with home affairs.
> 
> I mentioned in an earlier chapter that this fic features several references to Le Carre's work. This entire fic was inspired and sustained by a binge read through his bibliography, but this fic also owes a lot to P G Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers (whose work I also binge read while writing this) and Saki, whose gentlemen characters never fail to simultaneously delight and horrify me. 
> 
> Anyway, if you have any questions, thoughts or comments, hit me up over here in the comments or shoot me an ask on [tumblr](http://tobermoriansass.tumblr.com).


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